Am 18.01.24 um 18:47 schrieb Pablo Rodriguez via ntg-context:

On 1/18/24 18:24, Shiv Shankar Dayal wrote:

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I can process TeXBook in almost an instant using PDFTeX which is about 450+ pages but my math book takes around 30 seconds averaging ~40 pages/second.

Hi Shiv Shankar Dayal,

I guess that “The TeXbook” (having been written by Knuth himself) may be optimized for speed.

Your math book may use features (I’m guessing again) that require more resources than the features used by “The TeXbook”.

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Why LuaMetaTeX is so slow? How can I speed it up?

https://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/musings.pdf#page=96 might explain why Lua(Meta)TeX is slower.

Other chapters in that document from Hans might give you some insight on the reasons why LMTX has to pay a price for being more feature-rich. I got such impression when I read it.

Just in case it might help,

In comparison to LaTeX with LuaHBTeX, ConTeXt with LuaMetaTeX is lightning fast. pdfTeX is 8bit, and Knuth’s plain TeX is very low level – for a fairer comparison, try the TeXbook on LuaMetaTeX (I don’t know if “plain” works though). Hraban

Hi, On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 7:58 PM Shiv Shankar Dayal wrote:

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In comparison to LaTeX with LuaHBTeX, ConTeXt with LuaMetaTeX is lightning fast.

pdfTeX is 8bit, and Knuth’s plain TeX is very low level – for a fairer comparison, try the TeXbook on LuaMetaTeX (I don’t know if “plain” works though).

I understand that why it is slow, but the problem is that the difference is too high. My book has lots of math, so perhaps that is the reason.

For what it is worth, I have a math book (lots of math and references back and forth and some figures) and the 300 pages compiles in around 10s, so 30 pages/s. I don't have too much to compare with, and that is a bit slower than your 40 pages/s (but 40*30 is 1200 and not 450), but I consider that pretty fast. One thing you can try is \enableexperiments[fonts.compact] (as it sounds, it is still experimental). Also, if you do not provide any example code, it will be difficult for people to guess how _you_ can speed up your compilation (if at all). /Mikael

On Thu, 18 Jan 2024, Hans Hagen wrote:

Of course we'll never be as fast as (pure) plain tex (no layers added) or latex (which often is advocated as faster than context).

I was curious, so did a quick experiment: typeset \input knuth 500 times. Here are the results: pdflatex: 547 pages/sec lualatex: 308 pages/sec MKIV: 130 pages/sec LMTX: 147 pages/sec Interestingly, pdflatex, lualatex, and MkIV all generated pdf with 1112 pages, while LMTX generated a pdf with 1250 pages. Both MkIV and LMTX take the same time to run (8.5 sec) but LMTX generates more pages so it is faster. Of course, this is a meaningless experiment from a practical point of view as a 1000 page document will be more complex than just text. Aditya

On Fri, 19 Jan 2024, Hans Hagen via ntg-context wrote:

On 1/19/2024 12:34 AM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

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On Thu, 18 Jan 2024, Hans Hagen wrote:

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Of course we'll never be as fast as (pure) plain tex (no layers added) or latex (which often is advocated as faster than context).

I was curious, so did a quick experiment: typeset \input knuth 500 times. Here are the results:

pdflatex: 547 pages/sec lualatex: 308 pages/sec

opentype or type 1 ?

type 1. I did not change anything in the defaults. I'll try to figure out how to load opentype fonts in latex, and test lualatex.

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MKIV: 130 pages/sec LMTX: 147 pages/sec

that is weird as lmtx is always faster here (we loose some 15% on the backend compared to luatex, maybe even more, but we gain back quite a bit elsewhere for various reasons)

LMTX is faster for me as well.

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Interestingly, pdflatex, lualatex, and MkIV all generated pdf with 1112 pages, while LMTX generated a pdf with 1250 pages. Both MkIV and LMTX take the same time to run (8.5 sec) but LMTX generates more pages so it is faster.

puzzling

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Of course, this is a meaningless experiment from a practical point of view as a 1000 page document will be more complex than just text. % engine=pdftex 1.2 % engine=luatmetatex 1.6 % engine=luatex 1.8 % engine=xetex 2.4

\starttext

\dorecurse{500} { \input knuth \par }

\stoptext

125 pages, so how does your test file look

5000 recursions (not 500, sorry about that). \starttext \dorecurse{5000}{\ReadFile{knuth}} \stoptext I'll send you the PDFs offlist. Aditya

On 18 Jan 2024, at 18:56, Shiv Shankar Dayal wrote:

I understand that why it is slow, but the problem is that the difference is too high. My book has lots of math, so perhaps that is the reason.

Option 1: Buy or borrow a faster computer. You'll get your desired speed-up far faster than waiting for Hans to make changes, even assuming there is something that can be changed. I'd recommend a Mac M3 :-) Option 2: Split your book into a project with each chapter, or even part of a chapter as a separate component and compile only the chapter you are working on. Set up a nighttime (or lunchtime) run to regenerate the entire book while you're away from the computer and speed doesn't matter. — Bruce Horrocks Hampshire, UK

Am 19.01.24 um 10:31 schrieb Hans Hagen:

(that said: luametatex runs fine on my mobile phone)

What’s the smallest/oldest device someone tried LMTX on? (We were joking about “Hans’ thermostate and Alan’s fridge“…) Would it run on some 8 bit homecomputer? (I’d guess the RAM is too limited, and loading from datasette would need hours…) Just curious. Hraban

Am 19.01.24 um 10:31 schrieb Hans Hagen:

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(that said: luametatex runs fine on my mobile phone)

What’s the smallest/oldest device someone tried LMTX on? (We were joking about “Hans’ thermostate and Alan’s fridge“…) Would it run on some 8 bit homecomputer? (I’d guess the RAM is too limited, and loading from datasette would need hours…)

Just curious. The smallest i have here is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802 which actually was a very nicely designed thing (also powers the hubble); processors never became cleaner. Now, as the kit I used only had 512 bytes ram (later 2K or so) it really learns one how to program efficiently (thihk of writing a simple game, save and load from cassette

On 1/19/2024 11:00 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote: player, etc in that space; dynamic adaptive functions and such) and you know where I'm coming from'(later pascal and modula). That said: luametatex has a smaller memory footprint than luatex although nodes are way bigger but even that won't make it run well on an 8 bit processor, assuming it can address 32 bit mem. Context mkii started on 4.7 Mhz intel (386) so now we're 1000 times faster but performance gain is not linear. After all, tex has to compete with other applications running at the same time (browsers, remote clients, media apps, web polling apps, zoom, etc.) so it's kin dof amazing that it actually performs okay. What boosted performance is for instance ssd's. What might boost is ddr5 memory but that has to catch up with ddr4 first. What also boosted luametatex is cpu cache. I remember when taco and I moved to the math part we noticed a drop in performance, until machines got updated with larger cache. We'd just crossed some magic threshold. Actually, I kind of assume that we're stuck with cpu performance but nevertheless luametatex became faster. It helps to develop on an older machine and not on a yearly updated one as that obscures matters. (Not that I'd not like a faster machine, but that comes at a steep price.) Hans ps. In the tranmsition from pdftex to luatex to luametatex one should not underestimate Taco's effort of going from basically unreadable and useless C output by web2c (pascal -> c) to what became the luatex C code base (with embedded original documentation). From that we added more functionality gradually over a decade till luametatex spun off, which then lead to quite a bit of refactoring again (but trying to maintain the spirit of how tex is programmed). ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On 1/19/2024 7:13 PM, Bruce Horrocks wrote:

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On 19 Jan 2024, at 09:31, Hans Hagen wrote:

On 1/18/2024 11:15 PM, Bruce Horrocks wrote:

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On 18 Jan 2024, at 18:56, Shiv Shankar Dayal wrote:

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I understand that why it is slow, but the problem is that the difference is too high. My book has lots of math, so perhaps that is the reason.

Option 1: Buy or borrow a faster computer. You'll get your desired speed-up far faster than waiting for Hans to make changes, even assuming there is something that can be changed. I'd recommend a Mac M3 :-)

As tex is a single core process (ok, the os might delegate some file handling to other cores) it benefits from jump in core speed. I use a 2017 laptop with a reasonable fast intel xeon. I have a few docks spread round with different resolution monitors (1920x1200, 2560×1440, 4096×2160) and performance also depends on the connected monitor.

I'd be curious to know how much these new processors impact performance over time because the ages of dohbling performance every year are past.

I mentioned the Mac M3 because it's not the cores that make the difference but the speed of the SSD. So reading the source and writing out the result, plus writing/reading any intermediate files is astonishingly fast on the Mac. Also the RAM is on the same die as the chip so RAM access speeds are high. Even if the app is single-threaded, the speed increases are significant - in fact especially when the app is single is threaded. :-)

File caching helps a lot indeed. Just compare context --make after a reboot with the second or third time after that. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On 18/01/2024 20:55, Gavin via ntg-context wrote:

That’s fast enough for me.

That's surely the key statement - 'fast' here is a personal thing, and 40 pages a second is fast enough for many people. It's certainly fast when you look at what LuaMetaTeX is doing, as Hans has said. Joseph