[apg]

John,

I think the easiest way to speed-up the process would be to disable external reference processing in the maps. You can provide titles in topicrefs by using attribute 'navtitle' with 'locktitle=yes' in topicrefs. Otherwise for each reference Serna will read and parse referenced XML file to pull in the title; although Serna does it quickly, it may take a while if you have hundreds of references.

If you want to do a profiling, you can do so without hacking Serna code: it is possible to write a small Python plugin which will register custom XSLT function, and then you can add invocation of this function in the stylesheet around xsl:document() function which pulls in the content (look in plugins/dita/dita-xsl-serna/map2fo.xsl)