When starting Asterisk in the foreground, there is a perceptible delay
when loading modules that use the ACO and sorcery config frameworks.
For example, a lightly configured res_pjsip took 853ms to load on my
VM.
I tracked down the slowness to the XPath queries used to associate the
relevant documentation with the config options. One improvement was
adding a call to xmlXPathOrderDocElems after loading an XML document.
From the libxml2 docs:
Call this routine to speed up XPath computation on static documents.
The second change was to remove recursive descent and wildcard
operators from the XPath queries. After these changes, res_pjsip takes
85ms to load on my VM and there is no longer a perceptible delay when
starting Asterisk in the foreground.