Re: Does MKIV take more time as MKII

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 14:47, Cecil Westerhof wrote:
>
> Both did not work for me. But removing --purgeall from my script reduced the
> time from 30 seconds to 10.

When you don't use --purgeall, ConTeXt calculates different things
(for example table of contents, cross-references etc.) and stores them
to temporary files. Next time when you compile the same document
without too many changes it simply reuses the old data.

But if you remove the temporary files with --purgeall, ConTeXt has to
recalculate everything from scratch. Out of curiosity I checked that
on my own document and realized exactly the same thing. Compile time
dropped from 27 to 9 seconds, but only because ConTeXt had to read and
typeset the document three times (I thought it usually did it twice).

If you remove all the temporary files and call context without
--purgeall, it will also take 30 seconds to typeset everything; it is
only the second and all the subsequent runs that finish the job
faster.

Mojca

PS: You would get the same kind of behaviour in MKII (however if MKII
only runs twice and if there is a speed factor of 1.5, you could
declare MKII being "three times faster" which does make some
difference when compilation time is long).

PPS (not to be taken (too) seriously): But I wouldn't be surprized if,
say, two years from now you would try to repeat the experiment just to
find out that MKIV became faster. (Unlikely to happen, but imaging
Taco coming to idea to use all the four processor cores of your new
machine and Hans reducing the number of required runs from three to
two plus some extra optimizations.)
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