Performance: call-template vs apply-template

Question

in XSLT processing, is there a performance difference between apply-template and call-template? In my stylesheets there are many instances where I can use either, which is the b

Answer 1

apply-template and call-template do not perform the same task, performance comparison is not really relevant here. call-template takes a template name as a parameter whereas apply-template takes an xpath expression. Apply-template is therefore much more powerful since you do not really know which template will be executed. You will get performance issues if you use complex xpath expressions. Avoid "//" in your xpath expressions since every node of your input document will be evaluated.