[OS X TeX] What kind of operation is TeXing? (concerning hardware)

[Gerben Wierda]

On 3 Feb 2005, at 17:40, Steffen Wolfrum wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am thinking about to buy a Mac Mini (1.42 MHz).
>
> Reading some reviews I noticed that a lack of this machine are 
> disk-intensive
> operations – for the hard drive seems to be relatively slow.

It is something I am going to investigate, but even excluding the 
slowing screen updates in scrolling text TeX on Mac OS X seems a lot 
slower than on other platforms.

http://www.nslog.org/latex.html has a table. Even with an adapted 
command (disabling Terminal output which wins you 10 seconds or so on 
this run):

time pdflatex source2e.tex >/dev/null

real    0m17.377s
user    0m16.100s
sys     0m0.580s

This 1.2GHz G4 is slow. A 1.4Ghz Pentium III, 1 GB RAM mit Debian Linux 
3.0 clocks in at 7seconds or so.

G
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