Re: distributed / parallel TeX?

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Hans Hagen wrote:
> 
>> Lars Huttar wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> We've been using TeX to typeset a 1200-page book, and at that size, the
>>> time it takes to run becomes a big issue (especially with multiple
>>> passes... about 8 on average). It takes us anywhere from 80 minutes on
>>> our fastest machine, to 9 hours on our slowest laptop.
>>
>> often there are ways to optimize the document style
> 
> In Latex, there is a package called mylatex, which allows you to create 
> a format consisting of your preamble. Then you can call latex with your 
> own format and this speeds up things.

not on this document since the processing takes way more than the startup

in jelle's doc it's the many many many local font definitions and the 
some 800 metapost graphics that are the culprit

- define fonts beforehand
- use unique mpgraphic when possible

i changes the definitions a bit and now get 5 pages per second on my 
laptop in luatex; xetex processes the pages a bit faster but spends way 
more time on the mp part

(of course 1450 pages of columnsets and multipage bTABLE's also cost a 
bit of time)

> This approach did not provide a significant speed improvement in latex 
> for me, and I don't know whether it will do so in context. Hans and 
> Taco, do you think that creating a personal format and possibly also 
> dumping some font related info could provide a tradeoff between 
> processing speed and disk space?

it depends, you might win maybe a second per run when on startup in 
cases where you have thousands of small runs but often using a small 
tree (like the minimals) pays of more

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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