[NTG-pdftex] processing speed

[Hans Hagen]

The Thanh Han wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 01:05:40AM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>> Hi,
>> did anybody observe already that pdftex gets slower and slower when
>> processing huge documents?
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> 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.
> 
> I confirm this symptom with pdftex-1.40.9. Not sure what is the
> cause yet...

i did a couple of tests (on windows so with other test files) and it 
looks like the problem is with the 'filename' (actually this is a kind 
of known issue); the filename ends up in the pool (and string) memory 
and although (if i remember right) etex reclaims that memory it looks 
like in pdftex (and luatex) that's not the case; eventually i run out of 
pool in both

putting the sample text in a macro (i.e. reading it once) works fine so 
it is related to the "\input <filename>"

Hans




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