You can't have it Good, Cheap, and Fast all at once ;)

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Mojca Miklavec <
mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.)
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
> If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to
> the Wiki!
>
> maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl /
> http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
> webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
> archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
> wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
>