[OS X TeX] Poor performance on a MacBookPro

Dave Murray-Rust D.S.Murray-Rust at sms.ed.ac.uk
Mon Sep 3 05:01:00 EDT 2007


Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

To answer questions:

On 2 Sep 2007, at 19:58, Richard Koch wrote:
> 1) Are you typesetting from Terminal?
Yup

>
> 2) Are you using pdftex, pdflatex, tex, or latex?

I'm not entirely sure ;). I'm typing latex, but as far as I can tell,
this doesn't exist anymore, and is a wrapper around pdftex?
>
> 3) Is ghostscript involved?
Nope.
>
> 4) Do you have illustrations
Yes, lots.

Peter_Dyballa:
> Can it be that you're using PK fonts that need to be made first?

Possibly, but the compile time stays pretty much the same even after
I've made it several times.

And to follow the suggestion of a file everyone can try, I made a
quick file as follows (inline because Mail's attaching confuses me at
the moment...) :
--------
\documentclass{article}

\title{Test Document}
\author{Dave Murray-Rust}
\begin{document}

Lorem ipsum dolor ....
\end{document}
--------

Here's a log of me texing it:
> sudo mv /sw /sw.tmp
> export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2007/bin/i386-darwin/:$PATH
> which latex
/usr/local/texlive/2007/bin/i386-darwin//latex
> time latex test

This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
%&-line parsing enabled.
entering extended mode
(./test.tex
LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
Babel <v3.8h> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax,  
dumylang, noh
yphenation, arabic, basque, bulgarian, coptic, welsh, czech, slovak,  
german, ng
erman, danish, esperanto, spanish, catalan, galician, estonian,  
farsi, finnish,
french, greek, monogreek, ancientgreek, croatian, hungarian,  
interlingua, ibyc
us, indonesian, icelandic, italian, latin, mongolian, dutch, norsk,  
polish, por
tuguese, pinyin, romanian, russian, slovenian, uppersorbian, serbian,  
swedish,
turkish, ukenglish, ukrainian, loaded.
(/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./ 
test.aux)
[1] (./test.aux) )
Output written on test.dvi (1 page, 240 bytes).
Transcript written on test.log.

real    0m9.774s
user    0m3.958s
sys     0m4.965s

FWIW, most of the time, approx 5 seconds, seems to be before the line
"entering extended mode" is printed, and then about another 3 seconds
before the "Babel..." line. It appears to be CPU bound, as well - PDF
tex takes up 95-100% cpu for most of the run. Mind you, now that I'm
looking at it, top is taking 8% of my cpu, which seems a little
excessive.

For comparison, on my linux box it takes 0.150s to latex this file.

Thanks for the help!
Dave





> On Sep 2, 2007, at 10:39 AM, Dave Murray-Rust wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm trying to use MacTex on a MacBookPro, and having awful  
>> performance issues. When I try to compile a chapter which I'm  
>> writing, it takes 33 seconds using TexLive from MacTex, and 13  
>> seconds using teTex from fink. This is in comparison to 4 seconds  
>> on an old laptop running Ubuntu.
>>
>> To fit in with everyone else's benchmarking, I thought running the  
>> tex-perf.sh would be a good route to take. Unfortunately, it still  
>> hadn't finished when I killed it after 5 minutes.
>>
>> Does anyone have any ideas or advice for debugging this? I'm  
>> pretty sure I'm running the i386-darwin version.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> dave
>>
>> ------------------------- Helpful Info -------------------------
>> Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
>> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
>> List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
>> List Reminders & Etiquette: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/list/
>>
>>
>
>




------------------------- Helpful Info -------------------------
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TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
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