I have a fix for this on a local checkout. The problem is that there are many more pointer comparisons in the code-base, e.g. in the Canonicalizer implementations, and I'm not comfortable adding in a configuration option for these until I can test with a DOM implementation that does not intern namespaces.

Is there a DOM implementation available in open-source land that either does not intern namespaces or allows disabling of interning via configuration?

Colm.

*** Bug 47833 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

We also hitting this bug. As in the report https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=46888 we are using Weblogic 10.3 but under Linux with IBM JDK.

This is a bug and should definitively be fixed.

Please read the following article about interning and xerces:
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2006/06/26/all-about-intern

Also when you look at the source code of the sun-jdk then you will notice
the following in the String class:

/**
     * Compares this string to the specified object.  The result is {@code
     * true} if and only if the argument is not {@code null} and is a {@code
     * String} object that represents the same sequence of characters as this
     * object.
     *
     * @param  anObject
     *         The object to compare this {@code String} against
     *
     * @return  {@code true} if the given object represents a {@code String}
     *          equivalent to this string, {@code false} otherwise
     *
     * @see  #compareTo(String)
     * @see  #equalsIgnoreCase(String)
     */
    public boolean equals(Object anObject) {
	if (this == anObject) {
	    return true;
	}
	if (anObject instanceof String) {
	    String anotherString = (String)anObject;
	    int n = count;
	    if (n == anotherString.count) {
		char v1[] = value;
		char v2[] = anotherString.value;
		int i = offset;
		int j = anotherString.offset;
		while (n-- != 0) {
		    if (v1[i++] != v2[j++])
			return false;
		}
		return true;
	    }
	}
	return false;
    }

so with a sun-jdk the equal call ends in a reference equality check, which will be true for xerces (as it does interning) and the overhead will be just a method call. I think other
vm's will do the same, and if not then use another vm if you rely on this "performance gain".

Interesting is also the documentation of xerces:
http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-j/features.html 
under "SAX Features" they state that interning is disabled by default. I don't know if it's old doc, generally the case for DOM or just for SAX events. If that's true, then this is just a vm optimisation and a reason more to fix this.

It was decided to move to only using equals() so no configuration option is needed. See issue 40897.