After a half dozen attempts to compare docbook xml files, I think I was able to submit acceptable xml to the online comparison form, however, after 60-70 seconds of processing I get a 'Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage' message.

The options were for docbook xml with revisionflags, no validation, no word by word and 2 uploaded files.

Hello Troy,

We've investigated this by looking at the logs (and also the files which Troy emailed to our support email address).

One of the problems with the service is poor error reporting (we've probably introduced a bug since release).  This needs work on the code of the actual web-service itself.

As you may have discovered input files should not contain revisionflag attributes.

There was another issue with Troy's data when running XEP - were investigating this further.

The performance issues are something we've been addressing  - we introduced a catalog to improve performance when we found fetching the docbook DTDs from docbook.org was slow and we added the 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 DTDs to the catalog.  Unfortunately Troy's files used the 4.2 DTDs.

Aside from the delays associated with fetching the DTDs there's not that much we can do to make things faster - its our own colocated server running the service and it has enough CPUs and RAM.  In some cases the three stage publishing pipeline (DeltaXML compare, docbook-xsl+customizations, XEP) just takes a longish time to run if the input documents are large.  Its possible the browser is just timing out waiting for the response from the server.

We will look at the service and several improvements are due soon (probably starting in the next 2 weeks):

- automatic removal of revisionflags on input documents
- add catalog support for more docbook DTDs
- add support for Docbook 5 and namespaces
- better error reporting
- consideration of new service models including separation of the upload, batch-processsing and then download to avoid timeouts

Any users of the service - please do report any problems you find here, feedback is welcome.  The components of the system are available for evaluation/download and you could run them locally if you have problems with data sizes and timeouts in the short term.   Running things locally also tends to work better if your docbook files reference images and you need these to appear in rendered results.


Nigel