[OS X TeX] Slow MacTeX 2008

[Maarten Sneep]

On 28 okt 2008, at 14:17, David B. Thompson, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE, CFM  
wrote:

> So, here is my problem. The time from my click of the "Typeset"  
> button (TeXShop 2.18) to the beginning of typesetting is about 25  
> seconds. Yes, I timed it.
>
> My install of TeXlive 2007 loaded much quicker than this. The delay  
> is long enough to be annoying when refreshing the rendered version  
> of the document, sufficiently so to make a quick refresh to check  
> coding and formatting untenable.
>
> How do I begin the debugging process? I want to fix this before I do  
> the install on my MacBook Pro.

Start by trying the same in the terminal. This allows you to see where  
the delay occurs.

To avoid effects of your particular TeX file, use the following:

time pdflatex sample2e.tex

for me this yields: real  0m0.456s; user  0m0.227s; sys  0m0.041s (on  
an 2.4 GHz iMac).

If your results are similar, then try to see if your particular latex  
file is to blame.

If this standard file already gives a very long compile time then  
perhaps a (very) large tree in ~/Library/texmf// is to blame. If you  
include many files, or use a huge number of packages, and your private  
tree is very large, then compile times may become long. Your private  
tree is searched on disk, without database file, for every included  
file. You can consider disabling this tree to test what happens, many  
standard packages are already available in the standard MacTeX 2008.

Hope this gets you started.

Report back here what the times above are, and also your $PATH and the  
output of
     kpsewhich -show-path=tex | tr ':' '\n'
in the terminal.

Maarten