@PauloCereda Finished your thesis?

@yo' oh no

@Skillmon so true!

@samcarter @TeXnician ooh secret matrix messages :)

I know speed of lualatex depends on how fast is a computer. But in general, I think I read lualatex averages about 50 pages per second. Is this about right? Assuming PC with lots of ram, and reasonably fast, on TL 2023? I am asking, because I am getting about 6 pages per second on my large pdf file. I think lualatex slows down when the file is larger. What do others get in term of speed? Is there a standard document to use to compare speeds on?

It takes 5.5 hrs per one pass to compile the file. This is for one pass only. It takes normally 3 passes. So 15-16 hrs to compile one pdf file which is 125,000 pages. This comes out to about 6 or so pages per second.

@Nasser I suppose it's wildly dependent on the document. I have a AMD Ryzen9 with 32G ram, and the circuitikz manual is compiled at 3.5 pages/second (255 pages in 73 seconds) while a blindtext document at 195 pages/second (192 pages in 0.95 seconds)...

@Rmano is there easy to follow instructions how to compile this circuitikz document using lualatex? I see this github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz but do I have to download all of that to compile it? or is it part of TL? I want to compare speed I get with what you have. Thanks.

@Nasser you should have it in your texlive install dir/texmf-dist/doc/latex/circuitikz; just copy the whole directory and compile circuitikzmanual.tex from inside the directory, should work.

small documents (say few thousands pages) it compile fast. But I noticed for larger documents it slows down a lot. Once it gets over ten of thousands of pages, it starts to slow down bad.

We need different benchmark documents of different sizes to compare with.

Yes, because the trend for a blindtext document seems exactly the opposite: (this is page/total time):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\def\lulla{
\Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument
\Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument
\Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument \Blinddocument
}
\begin{document}
\lulla \lulla \lulla \lulla
\end{document}

(Too lazy to use a foreach... 😉)

Obviously if you start swapping the thing will slow down...

Every time I make a small change, I have to wait 15 hrs for lualatex and 24 hrs for tex4ht to finish. This makes no sense. I need to find why these systems are so slow. I bought new PC for $3,000 thinking it will speed things up, but nothing really changed. At the rate I am adding pages to the pdf, it will soon take me a week to compile each time.

@Nasser Maybe the problem is the fact that you're producing a 10000 page document? (Or whatever its current state is.)

lualatex and tex4ht should be parallelized or something. I have 24 cores on my PC, but I think they only use one core. can Tex be parallelized? so it runs faster??

@Nasser well, I think that given the size of your PDF, this is quite impossible to solve, unless you manage to divide it into compilation units (you can always use pdftk to join them).

@Nasser look every three month or so you are coming along, complain that the compilation is slow and that you need to find out why. Why don't you simply start with it and try to identify the slow parts?

@UlrikeFischer I am not a lualatex guru. I do not know how to find why it is slow and where it is slow.

same for tex4ht. it is just very slow. I do not know why and where.

@Nasser it is your document. You know which macros you use and which package you load. You can remove parts. You can redefine environments so that they simply insert space and so on.

So if someone complains that their Ford truck is slow, the Ford company tells them, it is your truck. Start by removing parts of the engine one by one until you find which part is slowing the truck down.

@Nasser ...you bring the truck to an expert, which will be paid, and they will solve the problem ;-) (or not, I had a very bad experience with Ford, btw). If you could manage a document, maybe with some huge foreach loop in it, that shows the slowdown, maybe the expert here can help. Without looking at the truck, what can you do?

@Nasser why on earth to you process thousands of pages if you make "a small change" just process the changed sections. you only need to do a full run occasionally

@mickep (@JosephWright) github.com/w3c/xml-entities/commit/…