TeX works very slowly

Question

LaTeX compiler on my Debian system works very slowly. For example, file including only a few lines of text compiles several minutes. All this time LaTeX does something, but what exactly it does is what I can't figure out. I think it is unnormal.

I have texlive installed on my computer:

$ tex --version  
TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)  
kpathsea version 5.0.0  
Copyright 2009 D.E. Knuth.

$ cat easyfile.tex  
\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}  
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}  
\begin{document}  
Here is some text.  
\end{document}  

$ latex easyfile.tex 
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
entering extended mode
(./easyfile.tex
LaTeX2e <2009/09/24>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for   english,usenglishmax,dumylang,nohyphenation, bulgarian, ukrainian, russian, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/babel.sty
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/english.ldf
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/babel.def))
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/russianb.ldf
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/cyrillic/t2aenc.def)

Package babel Warning: No input encoding specified for Russian language on  input line 136.

)) (./easyfile.aux (/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/cyrillic/t2acmr.fd))
[1] (./easyfile.aux) )
Output written on easyfile.dvi (1 page, 240 bytes).
Transcript written on easyfile.log.

Can somebody help me?

Answer 1

From your comments it results that VARTEXFONTS points to a directory under /tmp, so the generated fonts will be removed by the system maintenance routine.

Try adding

export VARTEXFONTS ~/texlive/2011/texmf-var/fonts

to your .bashrc file. This will create the necessary font files in your home.

Consider also to install TeX Live 2011 http://tug.org/texlive as the Debian version of it is very outdated.