[tex-live] TeXLive 2005 is slower than TeXLive2003

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Sep 2006, at 2:55 pm, Jinsong Zhao wrote:

> Thanks to Jerzy for pointing me the program ntimer.exe
> which displays the Elapsed, Kernel, User and Idle time
> of the image specified in the command line.
>
> After run latex from TeXLive2005 and TeXLive 2003 using
> the following command:
>
> ntimer -l -f -s latex sample2e.tex
>
> I get the following results (get with diff), it shows that
> the TeXLive2005 is much slower that TeXLive2003.
>
> Does it just because using pdfeTeXk instead of e-TeXk?

Is the TL2005 version generating DVI or PDF output by default? If  
PDF, that would explain some slow-down (though not usually as much as  
you seem to have). If it's generating DVI, then there should be  
little difference.

How are these two TL systems installed -- on the same machine? On  
different disks? Could one texmf tree be on a significantly faster  
disk than the other?

Does the TL2005 setup also have a large personal (non-hashed) texmf  
tree?

Is the machine low on RAM? I can imagine that might matter more with  
TL2005 as the programs typically allocate more memory these days.

FWIW, my Dell machine (nearly 2 yrs old) runs "latex sample2e" with  
TL2005 in about 0.2 - 0.3 seconds (real time; varies a bit from one  
run to the next). That's under Linux, not Windows, and I don't have  
TL2003 alongside to compare, but it doesn't "feel" slow to me.

JK