On 12/3/2020 12:15 PM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
On 3 Dec 2020, at 11:35, Stephen Gaito <step...@perceptisys.co.uk> wrote:
Hans,
As I said my desktop is elderly... it has a 2.8GHz processor, 16Gb of
DDR3 memory, and a couple of old SATA1 hard disks, and only 3Mb of CPU
cache...
... all well past its use by date for single threaded ConTeXt. ;-(
So one way to get better performance for ConTeXt is to invest in a new
ultra fast processor. Which will cost a lot, and use a lot of power
which has to be cooled, which uses even more power....
Startup time can be improved quite a bit with an SSD. Even a cheap SATA
SSD is already much faster than a traditional harddisk. Doesn’t help
with longer documents, but it could be a fairly cheap upgrade.
also, an empty context run
\starttext
\stoptext
only takes 0.490 seconds on my machine, which means:
- starting mtxrun, which includes quite a bit of lua plus loading the
file database etc
- loading mtx-context that itself does some checking
- and then launches the engine (it could be intgerated but then we run
into issues when we have fatal errors as well as initializations so in
the end it doesn't pay off at all)
- the tex runs means: loading the format and initializing hundreds of
lua scripts including all kind of unicode related stuff
so, the .5 sec is quite acceptable to me and i knwo that when i would
have amore recent machine it would go down to half of that
now, making a tex run persistent is not really a solution: one has to
reset all kinds of counters, dimensions etc wipe node and token space,
etc an done would also have to reset the pdf output which includes all
kind of housekeeping states ... adding all kind of resetters and hooks
for that (plus all the garbage collection needed) will never pay back
and a 'wipe all and reload' is way more efficient then
of course, when i ever run into a secenario where I have to creeate tens
of thousands of one/few page docs very fast i might add some 'reset the
pdf state' because that is kind of doable with some extra code but to be
honest, no one ever came up with a project that had any real demands on
the engine that could not be met (the fact that tex is a good solution
for rendering doesn't mean that there is demand for it ... it is seldom
on the radar of those who deal with that, who then often prefer some pdf
library, also because quality doesn't really matter)
these kind of performance things are demand driven (read: i need a
pretty good reason to spend time on it)
I can’t comment on how to speed up the rest of what you are doing,
but generally multi-threading TeX typesetting jobs is so hard as to
be impossible in practise. About the only step that can be split off
is the generation of the PDF, and even there the possible gain is
quite small (as you noticed already).
indeed, see above
Typesetting is a compilation job, so the two main ways to speed things
along are
1) split the source into independent tasks, like in a code compiler
that splits code over separate .c / .cpp / .m / .p etc. files,
and then combine the results (using e.g. mutool)
2) precompile recurring stuff (in TeX, that would mean embedding
separately generated pdfs or images)
right
(and we are old enough and have been around long enough to have some gut
feeling about that)
Hans
ps. When it comes to performance of tex, lua, context etc it is no
problem, when googling a bit, to run into 'nonsense' arguments of why
something is slow ... so don't take it for granted, just ask here on
this list
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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl
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