FULL PRODUCT VERSION :
java version "1.6.0_18"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_18-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode)

ADDITIONAL OS VERSION INFORMATION :
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]

A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
A change to com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.runtime.AbstractTranslet.java in 1.6.0_18 appears to cause a performance regression when the output encoding is US-ASCII.

I noticed this when running ant junitreport tasks with output on file servers -- the time to process junit output jumped from a few seconds to tens of minutes. I tracked it down to com.sun.org.apache.xml.internal.serializer.WriterToASCI being initialized with a non-buffered FileOutputStream.

As far as I can tell the source of this problem is a change on line 554 of AbstractTranslet.java:

factory.setWriter(new FileWriter(filename, append));

became

factory.setOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(filename, append));

This change from a Writer to an OutputStream triggers com.sun.org.apache.xml.internal.serializer.ToStream to create a WriterToAsci on top of the unbuffered stream.

Subsequent writes of one byte at a time to this unbuffered stream cause lots of network traffic, but not much progress ;-)


REPRODUCIBILITY :
This bug can be reproduced always.

Release Regression From : 6u17
The above release value was the last known release where this
bug was not reproducible. Since then there has been a regression.