All of my experience with XML parsing is that its dog fucking slow.

XSL is dog on dog fucking slow. (And also write-only like bad perl).

Anyhow, its kind of hard to take your assertion that performance is at the top of your requirements when you're using toy tools and machines to build your website.

If you were really serious about performance, you'd write an apache module in C that called to a template and query processor - also written in C, and you'd deploy it on a nice big Sun box. You'd also be using Oracle. That would let you get some serious performance. Development would take forever but it would be seriously fast.

This isn't meant to be a flame or anything but I remain confused as to why anybody at all buys into the MS house of cards architecture.

Repeat after me - nothing from Redmond goes into mission or performance critical production systems. Ever. Its just not sound engineering practice.