Re: Using ConTeXt-LMTX for modern Mathematically-Literate-Programming 1/2

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

> On 3 Dec 2020, at 11:35, Stephen Gaito <stephen@perceptisys.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hans,
> 
> As I said my desktop is elderly... it has a 2.8GHz processor, 16Gb of
> DDR3 memory, and a couple of old SATA1 hard disks, and only 3Mb of CPU
> cache...
> 
> ... all well past its use by date for single threaded ConTeXt. ;-(
> 
> So one way to get better performance for ConTeXt is to invest in a new
> ultra fast processor. Which will cost a lot, and use a lot of power
> which has to be cooled, which uses even more power....

Startup time can be improved quite a bit with an SSD. Even a cheap SATA
SSD is already much faster than a traditional harddisk. Doesn’t help
with longer documents, but it could be a fairly cheap upgrade.

I can’t comment on how to speed up the rest of what you are doing,
but generally multi-threading TeX typesetting jobs is so hard as to
be impossible in practise. About the only step that can be split off
is the generation of the PDF, and even there the possible gain is 
quite small (as you noticed already).

Typesetting is a compilation job, so the two main ways to speed things
along are

1) split the source into independent tasks, like in a code compiler
   that splits code over separate .c / .cpp / .m / .p etc. files,
   and then combine the results (using e.g. mutool)

2) precompile recurring stuff (in TeX, that would mean embedding
   separately generated pdfs or images)

Best wishes,
Taco





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