Hello, I've been perusing the list archives for a couple of days now, and reading up on articles (such as Hans' regarding optimizing in TeX and eTeX) to find guidance on a handful of decisions. Our company makes a web-based publishing solution called MemoryPress.com that uses conTeXt for on-demand creation of PDFs which are then converted to jpeg format for display in a web browser. We are currently looking into ways to speed things up and since many of you are far more qualified than I am in this area, I wondered if you might advise me on the following: 1. Is there a way to keep TeX in-memory (i.e. as a server or daemon process) so that it doesn't have to load and reload fonts and the environment? Our system makes repeated requests for typeset documents and we are wondering if there's a way to remove the overhead of re-running pdftex. 2. Among the many different command-line TeX options, what might optimize for speed? I've done some rudimentary benchmarking and found that executing etex (without conTeXt) is much faster than texexec, and wondered if there is any advice in this area. Is there any way to shave off some of the overhead of using conTeXt? 3. I've noticed that there is some kind of caching going on (tui/tuo files?) that helps speed things up after the first run. How can I best take advantage of this facility? What kinds of things will require TeX to start from scratch, vs. use some or all of this cached information? 4. Are there any other areas I should consider when looking for ways to use TeX as an on-demand typesetting engine? Thank you, Duane Johnson Programming Manager FamilyLearn