Profile the rendering process and document scope for optimisations

[craigfowler]

The performance of the ZPT renderer has not yet been considered at all, and there has been little-to-no effort to make it performant at all. Now that I am increasing my usage of the renderer and that I am facing timeout issues in Screenplay reports, the tone is right to do some benchmarking and profiling and then to optimise the rendering engine.

Profiling

Firstly, I need to profile the engine under some typical circumstances. To do this, I will need to create some test pages to profile.

The profiling should be performed against ASP.NET MVC 5, and each profile should be compared against a profile for the equivalent page (with an equivalent model) using the Razor rendering engine.

A number of test profiles should be created (using a variety of techniques). Particularly important are:

• C# expressions
• Loops (large and small, between 5 and 10,000 iterations)
• Nested loops
• METAL macro usage
• Macro usage within a loop
• load expressions
• The various document type plugins

The results of the profiling should be recorded within/attached to this ticket. This can then be referred-to in the future for further work as applicable.

Optimisation

The actual optimisation will be decided by the results of the benchmarking and profiling.

Importantly, I'm expecting a marked speed improvement in the rendering of large documents.