On 2024-08-31 at 21:50:33 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote: > on 400 10 character exceptions i see no gain (on a 5 year old laptop) as > we're in the random runtime measurements; runs only differ in the second > decimal so .452 .. .454 which makes it hard to check fo it matters
Regarding performance tests, there are a few things worth to be mentioned. You get different results in different environments. First of all, in TeX Live luatex.ini contains the line \input load-unicode-data.tex This huge file blows up the format file and increases startup time significantly. AFAIK it's currently only used by LaTeX and can be safely removed from all plain TeX formats. Another point is kpathsea. It accelerates file lookup significantly but nowadays TeX Live provides more than 200,000 files and processing all the ls-R files takes a lot of time too. The solution is to create a tiny self-contained TeX distribution on-the-fly which only contains the files needed. http://reinhardk.ddns.net/scripts/tex/tinytex/ I recently investigated because there was a talk about a new typesetting system called "Typst" at TUG-2023. They claimed that it's extremely fast, a "hello world" can be compiled within 140 ms. With the setup decribed above I can compile a "hello world" with Knuth's TeX within 13 ms and "The TeXbook" (285 pages) in less than 190 ms. But it would take much longer with load-unicode-data.tex in the format file and a complete TeX Live installation. In order to compare performance on different machines it's necessary to make sure that the environments are comparable. Especially the startup time has a significant impact on the results. Regards, Reinhard -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------
