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?
xelatex test.tex
and compare the output, you will see several more files being loaded in the 2011 version than in the 2009 version.article
class, as that probably hasn't changed…