Major performance slowdown unmarshalling between version 0.9.4.3 and 1.1.2.1

Without further information, this is going to be hard to analyze. I've had already had a detailed look at the release notes starting at 1.1.1, and I did not see a single commit set that might cause such an order of slow-down. One thing that came to my attention is that we have switched logging to commons-logging (and as such either Java logging or log4j or whatever you are using)., As such, this slowdown might be caused by excessive logging to e.g. stdout or a file (in case you happen to be using e.g. a FileAppender with log4J). If this is the case, I'd be interested to learn whether changing the log level to e.g. warn or error does cause a change in runtime behavior.

Just to make a few things clear. After a few conversations with the reporter (off-line, that is), it turns out that the problem reported is related to validation only. If validation is (selectively) turned off, the slowdown vanishes and normal performance is restored.

I am currently in the process of profiling a test case, and will report any findings in due time.

I thought that I noticed a significant performance degradation when I put in my patches to 1.1.1 relating to proper hashCode calculation and cyclic references in the XML document (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/CASTOR-2012). This is unlikely to be the cause, but may have exacerbated the situation. The slow down is definitely on validation, and this is now turned off in our application - but I'd really like to turn it back on!

Following the lines of enquiry begin in http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/CASTOR-1985, I noticed that the ValidationContext class holds sets of objects being validated in a HashSet, rather than using the org.castor.util.IdentitySet. Changing this appeared to slightly improve the speed of marshalling and unmarshalling (we still validate on unmarshalling). I suspect there are a few other cases where this is occuring.

Initial patch for review.