Is there a way to find out how long it took for my document to compile?

Question

I was thinking it'd be nice to know how much time each package I load adds on to the total time between clicking "compile" and seeing the PDF come up on my screen, so that I can figure out which ones I shouldn't load unless necessary. If there were a way of measuring the precise amount of time it takes to compile (i.e., have the computer measure it, not try to approximate it by hand with a stopwatch), I can just remove one package at a time and measure the differences. But I can't find a way of doing this; I hunted around in the "log" file and didn't see this info, and I couldn't find any packages that add this functionality.

Ultimately, I admit it's not that big of a deal - compiling usually only takes a second, maybe two - but now I'm curious how to do this, and it could be relevant in much larger documents (with longer compile times).

Answer 1

This is somewhat OS dependent. On Linux and OS X you can use the time command from the command line.

time pdflatex myfile.tex

returns: (e.g.)

real    0m1.976s
user    0m0.331s
sys     0m0.091s

There may be a similar command in Windows. Depending on your editing environment, you can probably modify the latex command from within the editor (temporarily) to run the time command when you compile, which would make checking the times for different package configurations easier.

Answer 2

If you are using the pdftex engine, you can measure the time that each package takes to be loaded by adding the following near the start of your document.

\makeatletter
\newcommand{\typeoutthetime}
  {\typeout{\strip@pt\dimexpr\pdfelapsedtime sp\relax sec.}}
\edef\@popfilename
  {%
    \unexpanded\expandafter{\@popfilename}%
    \noexpand\typeoutthetime
  }
\makeatother

You could also hook similarly at the end of the document with Heiko Oberdiek's atveryend package: \AtVeryVeryEnd{\typeoutthetime}.

Answer 3

By default ConTeXt gives

system          | total runtime: 35.093

at the end of each compile. This is the cumulative for all the runs needed to resolve references, etc. For more detailed usage, there is a timing module, which gives a graphical output of the resources used per page.

\usemodule[timing]
\starttext
 ,,,
 ...
\page
\ShowUsage{}
\stoptext

The output is similar to the graphs shown in Chapter XIX of the Mk manual.

Answer 4

The regstats package with option "timer" gives the time needed for the specific (pdflatex) compilation run, using \pdfelapsedtime.

%% When compiling with lua(la)tex (and wanting to use option timer=true)
%% the following line must be uncommented (i.e. remove the "%% ").
%% \directlua{starttime = os.clock()}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[timer=true]{regstats}[2012/04/01]
\begin{document}
When option \verb|timer| (or \verb|timer=true|) is chosen, also the time
needed for the compilation run is given. The used \verb|\pdfelapsedtime|
is not available, when lua(la)tex is used instead of pdf(la)tex to compile
the document. In that case at the very beginning of your TeX file say
\verb|\directlua{starttime = os.clock()}|
(even before \verb|\documentclass|!), and the timer option can also be
used with lua(la)tex. When neither lua(la)tex nor pdf(la)tex is used
to compile the document, the timer(-option) does not work.

For the resulting message, please compile and have a look at the end
of the log-file.

Because the compilation time for this example is usually quite short,
option \texttt{timer} is not demonstrated very spectacular.
\end{document}

Answer 5

TeX, LaTeX and all its distributives offer (at least since version 3)
a compilation command -time-statistics.

(You can find a list of compilation options and commands,
by opening a command line and execute latex --help.)

Not sure though, wether (and how) one may invoke this compilation command directly from .tex files.
Compare for example \batchmode to invoke -interaction=batchmode.

Still hope this may be useful to someone. :)

Besides, here's what its execution looks like:

Answer 6

You need to download timeit from Windows 2003 Resource Kit. Then run in Windows command line:

timeit xelatex.exe -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode C:\Users\USERNAME\test_directory\test.tex. 

It worked on Windows 10

Answer 7

latexmk has the option -time. It will output the time of each pass of the TeX-engine as well as the accumulated total time to generate all the documents. For example, the command

latexmk -pdf -silent -time file.tex

gives the output

Latexmk: Run number 1 of rule 'pdflatex'
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.20 (TeX Live 2019) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
Latexmk: Run number 2 of rule 'pdflatex'
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.20 (TeX Live 2019) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
'pdflatex  -interaction=batchmode -recorder  "file.tex"': time = 0.23
'pdflatex  -interaction=batchmode -recorder  "file.tex"': time = 0.26
Accumulated processing time = 0.57