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

[Bernhard Barkow]

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On 2. Mär 2005, at 22:29, Herb Schulz wrote:
>> You've got to compile from the Command Line and redirect the output 
>> from
>> pdflatex to /dev/null, the bit bucket.
>>
>> time pdflatex source2e >/dev/nul
>>
>> is the full command line command. The screen output takes quite a bit 
>> of
>> time. On my 550MHz Powerbook it took 38s... Sigh...
>>
>> ...

> Let's see now... I've added 512MB of RAM to my PowerBook 550MHZ G4; up 
> to
> 1GB now. I've also put in a new drive, the Fujitsu 80GB 5400RPM drive
> recommended on this list, from a stock 30GB 4200RPM drive. In general
> programs load faster and I get very little swapping now; the system 
> feels
> snappier when loading off the HD and if I have lots of programs open at
> once. Best of all is the silence of the HD and all the extra space for 
> more
> photos.
>
> I just re-ran the ``time pdflatex source2e >/dev/null'' (3rd run) and 
> got
> the same results. It appears that the bottleneck is not RAM or HD
> performance but shear processor power that is needed for this job to 
> get
> done quickly.
>

This might explain why the results were not as fast as I had expected 
on my Dual G4 (with 1.25GB RAM); I'm not enough of an expert on these 
issues, but probably typesetting is something which is not easily 
scalable to multiple processors.

Bernhard Barkow


____________________________________________________
_________________________________ Bernhard Barkow __
__                                                __
__ mail bb at creativeeyes.at __ www.creativeeyes.at __
__ Phone  +43 699 12660415 __ Fax   +43 1 8775334 __
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