[tex-live] TeXLive 2005 is slower than TeXLive2003

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 9/6/06, Jinsong Zhao <jszhao at mail.hzau.edu.cn> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am using TeXLive 2005 now, however, I found that it more slower than
> TeXLive 2003. Every program, e.g., latex, pdflatex, dvips, and so on,
> is lower than the one in TeXLive 2003 distribution.
>
> I run ``latex sample2e.tex'' from command line, the command latex in
> TeXLive 2005 completed the compilation using about 6.95 second, however,
> the one in TeXLive2003 using about 1.45 second.
>
> Of course, the timer here is wall clock. I don't know how to time the
> program run time under Windows.
>
> My OS is Windows XP, and I run those program from command line (cmd).
>
> Any suggestions will be really appreciated!

As a ppoint of comparision, I ran "time latex sample2e" and "strace
latex sample2e"
on a Fedora Core 4 linux system (1.8Ghz P4) using a) standard tetex3
from the distro, b) my TL2005.5 testbed, which has several additional
texmf trees for testing
and pdftex-1.40.0-beta-20060906 (Web2C 7.5.5).  The binaries used for latex are:

[gwhite at cerberus test]$ ldd /usr/bin/pdfetex
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0x0081c000)
        libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x0031e000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x0099c000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x05ecd000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00975000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00d56000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0083a000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x0081d000)
[gwhite at cerberus test]$ ldd /usr/local/texlive/2005/bin/i686-linux/pdftex
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0x0081c000)
        libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x0031e000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x0099c000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00975000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0083a000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x0081d000)


For tetex3:

[gwhite at cerberus teTeX3]$ time latex sample2e
This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)
entering extended mode
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, b
ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, e
stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, norsk, polis
h, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish, tur
kish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./sample2e.aux)
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/omscmr.fd) [1] [2] [3] (./sample2e.aux) )
Output written on sample2e.dvi (3 pages, 7496 bytes).
Transcript written on sample2e.log.

real    0m0.518s
user    0m0.084s
sys     0m0.032s
[gwhite at cerberus teTeX3]$ strace latex sample2e > strace.out 2>&1
[gwhite at cerberus teTeX3]$ wc -l strace.out
667 strace.out

For TL2005.5

gwhite at cerberus TL2005][$ time latex sample2e
This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.0-beta-20060906 (Web2C 7.5.5)
 \write18 enabled.
 %&-line parsing enabled.
entering extended mode
(./sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
Babel <v3.8g> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, basque, french, ukenglish, loaded.
(/mnt/hdb/opt/tex/texlive/2005/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
(/mnt/hdb/opt/tex/texlive/2005/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(./sample2e.aux)
(/mnt/hdb/opt/tex/texlive/2005/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/omscmr.fd) [1]
[2] [3] (./sample2e.aux) )
Output written on sample2e.dvi (3 pages, 7496 bytes).
Transcript written on sample2e.log.

real    0m0.794s
user    0m0.148s
sys     0m0.008s
[gwhite at cerberus TL2005]$ strace latex sample2e > strace.out 2>&1
[gwhite at cerberus TL2005]$ wc -l strace.out
794 strace.out

Following Karl's suggestion to compare the results of "kpsewhich
--debug N story.tex":

[gwhite at cerberus TL2005]$ kpsewhich --debug 1 story.tex > debug_1.out 2>&1
[gwhite at cerberus TL2005]$ wc -l debug_1.out
105 debug_1.out
[gwhite at cerberus teTeX3]$ kpsewhich --debug 1 story.tex > debug_1.out
2>&1 [gwhite at cerberus teTeX3]$ wc -l debug_1.out
109 debug_1.out

The extra lines are due to RedHat's texmf.cnf listing some non-existent paths.
Maybe tetex3 would look faster using a properly configured texmf.cnf.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia