Hi, did anybody observe already that pdftex gets slower and slower when processing huge documents? I recently wrote a few perl scripts which create huge LaTeX files containing data from spectrum analyzers and I'm using the pgfplots package in order to visualize the results. On my humble Windows machine it takes about one second to create such a plot. This is ok even if I have to create thousands of them. But now I have to create thousands of them, and I noticed that the amount of time needed to produce one single plot is increasing steadily. I first thought that it's a pgfplots issue but I created test files which confirm that it's a pdftex problem. Download the tiny Perl script http://tug.org/~kotucha/mktestfiles.gz and then try: tex --shell-escape testplain.tex and pdftex --shell-escape testplain.tex What you'll see on screen is the output of "date +%s" whenever the \input file had been processed. (Thus, it works only on UNIX). You'll see that at the beginning Knuth's TeX and pdfTeX need approximately the same amount of time to process one \input file. But while Knuth's TeX needs the same amount of time to process any \input file, the amount of time pdfTeX needs increases steadily. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------