[radicalbyte]

The problem is that it's often misused. Using an XSLT that takes 0.5s to run to transform some XML to HTML during web requests on a busy site? Idiotic.

Using it for async transformations - html to pdf, customer message format to your message format. Fine.

[crdoconnor]

The problem is not that it is misused. The problem is that there is a small subset of problems for which it works passably (like many other technologies) and a large universe of problems for which it will cause you massive pain.

[brunnsbe]

Using compiled XSLT-translets in Java (XSLTC) has a huge impact on performance, with transformations taking 0.5s the problem seems to be in the way your XSLT is written and pushing or pulling the data, not XSLT itself: http://xalan.apache.org/old/xalan-j/xsltc_usage.html

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Compiled XSLT stylesheets must be very efficient; they're automata, like regular expressions.