[OS X TeX] benchmark a pdflatexmk run on a Mac Studio?

[Murray Eisenberg]

> On 2 May2022, at 2:23 PM, Warren Nagourney via MacOSX-TeX <macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On May 2, 2022, at 9:59 AM, Murray Eisenberg <murrayeisenberg at gmail.com <mailto:murrayeisenberg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 2 May2022, at 11:52 AM, William F. Adams via MacOSX-TeX <macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu <mailto:macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Have you seen:
>>> 
>>> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/571954/apple-silicon-m1-mac-compatibility-for-mactex-and-performance <https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/571954/apple-silicon-m1-mac-compatibility-for-mactex-and-performance>
>>> 
>>> William
>> 
>> Yes, I have seen that. But it doesn’t address performance on the Mac Studio with Max CPU.
>> 
>> Already when I do a complete pdflatexmk run of my 700-page book on a 13” MacBook Air M1 with 8-core CPU, 16GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD, it takes about 30 seconds less than on my mainstay machine, a2019 iMac 27” with 3.6 GHz 8-core Intel i9, 64 GB RAm, and 2 TB SSD. On the latter, a complete run takes about 5 1/2 minutes. That seems excruciatingly long when I’m waiting to do further writing or editing after looking at what I have so far, complete with all cross-references filled on.
>> 
>> To have all the needed windows open, that 13” MacBook Air is out of the question, though.
>> 
>> Hence my interest in the M1 Max chip on a desktop.
>> 
> 
> Murray,
> 
> That seems very long on both devices. I have a 500 page book with about 1500 equations and about 500 figures and typesetting takes about 3 seconds on the M1 and about twice that on the Intel machine. I am guessing that the time limiting task on your machines is not typesetting but something else. 
> 
> Knuth acknowledges that TeX will not benefit from more than one core (the famous interview ~2010). I have seen a slew of benchmarks of the M1 Max vs the M1 Pro and the only place where it makes a difference is in tasks which can take advantage of the GPU. Of course, TeX is not in that category, but apps which do video editing and some scientific apps using the Apple replacement for OpenCL are.  
> 
> A developer of a popular iOS app (Marco Arment) has tested the Xcode compile time on an M1 Max with 64 GB of Ram and an M1 Pro with 16 GB and it took exactly the same time on both machines (19 sec, vs 30 sec on an M1 in a Mac Mini).  
> 
> I doubt very much that there will be any difference in typesetting speed for any of the current M1-based machines. 
> 


On my Intel CPU iMac, I just retimed with no other apps running, including no real-time antivirus, and the complete PDFLATEXMK engine run through TeXShop is down to under 4 minutes.

The preamble is complicated and loads many packages. Sectioning enviroments are colored, as are headings of theorem-like environments; the bodies of many theorem-like environments appear on a colored background; some of the math symbols used frequently are made using the picture environment; I’m using crossreftools along with cleveref and hyperref; the index is very detailed; etc.

I even tried just running the pdflatex command directly in Terminal, and the first pass takes 2 min 39 sec. And doing the complete, multi-pass run, using the following shell script, takes 4 min 16 sec:

#! /bin/bash
pdflatex book
biber book
pdflatex book
pdflatex book
makeindex book.nlo -s book.ist -o book.nls
makeindex names.idx -s names.ist -o names.ind
makeindex -s book.ist book
pdflatex book
pdflatex book

That at least indicates the overhead of processing through TeXShop is minimal.

---
Murray Eisenberg		murrayeisenberg at gmail.com
Mobile (413)-427-5334
503 King Farm Blvd #101		
Rockville, MD 20850-6667	



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