Performance of TeXLive 2011 on Ubuntu 11.10

Question

I'm comparing the performance of the TeXLive 2009 packages that come with Ubuntu 11.10, to the TeXLive 2011 packages that are installed directly from TeXLive on an x86_64 platform.

To my great surprise, TeXLive 2011 seems to be much slower than the TeXLive 2009. About half the speed, according to my tests.

Here's a degenerate example, with a file named test.tex:

\documentclass{memoir}
\begin{document}\end{document}

Running time xelatex test.tex >/dev/null three times for each yields:

TeXLive 2009 (native Ubuntu packages)

real   0m0.575s
user    0m0.375s
sys 0m0.199s

real    0m0.659s
user    0m0.421s
sys 0m0.237s

real    0m0.587s
user    0m0.382s
sys 0m0.205s

TeXLive 2011 (TeXLive packages)

real   0m1.122s
user    0m0.912s
sys 0m0.210s

real    0m1.073s
user    0m0.877s
sys 0m0.196s

real    0m1.094s
user    0m0.869s
sys 0m0.224s

Can anyone explain why TeXLive 2011 might be so much slower in this comparison?

More importantly, how can one improve the performance of TeXLive 2011 on Ubuntu?

Answer 1

Running the different binaries with the same packages:

TL 2011:

real    0m0.351s   
user    0m0.283s                                       
sys     0m0.067s                                                      

TL 2009:

real    0m0.369s
user    0m0.288s
sys     0m0.060s

on Linux, SuSE 12.1