Philip Taylor wrote:
Advance notice of a question to be posted tomorrow : On my main machine, I run TeX Live in a VM with 3340Gb of memory. My main project at the moment relies on PDF image inclusion by XeTeX. Changing the "V" parameter from "5" to "6" in my local copy of "dvipdfmx.cfg" not only suppresses a large number of messages about "Version of PDF file is greater than ..." (one for each image file) but also speeds up compilation by a factor of about 10. On this new machine, I have no VMs but I still have 4Gb of memory. TeX Live 2014 does not whinge about "Version of PDF file is greater than ..." with "V 5" in the default "dvipdfmx.cfg" (good) but increasing "V 5" to "V 6" or even "V 7" makes no difference whatsoever to the compilation speed, which becomes depressingly slow as soon as the first image inclusion is encountered. I will try to document this better tomorrow, but in the mean time can anyone think of any reason why TeX Live 2013 XeTeX should be able to process my document ten times faster than TeX Live 2014 so long as I increase "V 5" to "V 6" in a local copy of "dvipdfmx.cfg" whilst the latter makes no difference whatsoever in TeX Live 2014 ?
I think I now know the answer to this question. It would seem that the TeX run-time system was unaware of the existence of a new instance of "dvipdfmx.cfg" in D:\TeX\Live\2014\TeXMF\Local\dvipdfmx and thus was not honouring it. Thinking (wrongly) that the TeX run-time system maintained a database for the contents of TEXINPUTS (to which I had added the location of the image files, to overcome the lack of access to environment variables from a XeTeX \input statement), I ran the TeX Live manager and instructed it to "Update filename database"; once this was done, the speed-up expected from increasing "V 5" to "V 6" was immediately realised.
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