Seriously though the DocBook XSL stylesheets don't scale well to very large documents - and if one library's XML has a SNAFU then nothing builds :-(
Out of interest - how is it that the stylesheets don't scale well? I would have thought they would stay the same no matter how large the document was?
Time taken for a 1000 page doc is not 10x the time for a 100 page doc: some things, certainly index generation (which we're not using at present, but I'm experimenting with now) and also seemingly hyperlinking and document outlining require more than O(N) time, probably more like O(N^2) for indexing. It's the XSLT transforms that take the time BTW, not the FO->PDF transform. Basically building all of Boost takes more or less all day, where as all the separate PDF's are built in 30-40 minutes total. John.