[tex-live] Making TeX run faster

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> asks today:

>> what document did you use? the texbook?
>> ... it makes a difference if you run in batchmode or 
>> not; the speed of output to the the console differs a lot (varies per os, 
>> console buffer size, bitmap versus outline screen fonts, etc

Yes, the TeXbook, and the tests are run in normal mode, not batchmode,
since that is the way most people run TeX. I've used the same testing
harness for many years, so all results are accumulated the same way.

In the Unix world, xterms run with bitmap fonts, so the results are
again comparable.

If others are interesting in contributing to the benchmark data, I can
make the (Unix) test scripts available.  Eventually, the collected
data could be used in an interesting short TUGboat article on TeX
performance.






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