3 ms·
On my 2015 Mac, using just a single core, TeX composes the entire 495-page TeXbook in under 0.2 seconds, or about 0.4 milliseconds per page. That includes readi
by drfuchs 4y ago
On my 2015 Mac, using just a single core, TeX composes the entire 495-page TeXbook in under 0.2 seconds, or about 0.4 milliseconds per page. That includes reading the 1.3Mb input file, evaluating all macros and such, doing all line-breaking and page-breaking, and writing the entire 1.9Mb dvi file.
So, I don't know where the "too slow" meme is coming from. Is there a browser that can open and scroll to the end of an HTML page that's 500 screen-fulls long in 0.2 seconds?
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago> So, I don't know where the "too slow" meme is coming from Perhaps the parent commenter is executing `pdftex` on Windows. Like all Windows ports of UNIX/Linux-first software, LaTeX experiences the double whammy of the NT kernel being slow with small files + Windows Defender scanning. NTFS is not at fault, oddly enough: it works fast enough in Linux with the recent in-kernel NTFS3 driver. I use the same distribution (MiKTeX) on both Windows and Linux, and Linux is easily 10× as fast as Windows when compiling complex files (TikZ graphs and diagrams, `.bib` files, internal hyperlinks, etc).
- beej71 4y agoI'm building through Pandoc and LaTeX, and just the LaTeX part on my modern computer is orders of magnitude slower than your numbers, ~20 ms per page. Is that a normal difference between plain TeX and LaTeX? Or more to do with the output of Pandoc?
- svat 4y agoSee similar discussion from a couple of weeks ago where I too mentioned "about a millisecond a page": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32204910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32204910 — yes some overhead comes from LaTeX, and even more from heavyweight macro packages that one may be using. Some people even end up with several orders of magnitude worse than your 20ms per page :/