[pdftex] Hyphenating Cyrillic text.

[Hans Hagen]

At 08:14 PM 12/4/2001 +0200, Ville Voipio wrote:
> > if you've got the physical memory to support it, fine.  force your
> > system to swap, and you'll be whinging about the feeble behaviour of
> > tex.
>
>The discussion about TeX memory requirements has been very interesting,
>indeed. However, I wonder what the real memory requirement is? Of course,
>dynamic memory allocation would me more economic from the memory point of
>view, but is memory really a problem today? I guess many computers would
>allow the "add one zero" approach without sacrificing usability.
>
>A modern PC has 256 MiB of memory, and another 256 MiB costs around 40 E (or
>$40). If we compare this to the situation during the days TeX was born, the
>difference is vast. Still, the jobs have not grown exponentially, i.e., a
>book is still approximately the same size it was twenty years ago.

right, but today we have color, graphic inclusion, hyperlinks, etc so the 
demands are bigger; in a sense the jobs do grow, but since tex itself 
doesn't, the overal performance does not suffer that much; also, efficient 
macro programming still pays off;

>Dynamic memory allocation would be nice in mainframe environment, where a
>plethora of users struggle over the resources. But in PC environment I do
>not see much difference, there ought to be enough memory for most things,
>anyway. So, I would not put dynamization of TeX memory allocation at a very
>high position on my wishlist.

right, although dynamic pattern loading would be nice [and not that impossible]

>Due to the exponential growth of computer memory size, there is no problem
>if the memory requirements of a program stay approximately the same. It
>would even be enough if the exponential groth rate of memory requirements
>were below that of the memory capacity. Most programs require more and more
>memory, and I would not say TeX needs a lot. Just have a look at Microsoft
>Office or StarOffice memory consumption...


In the case of pdftex there is the basic tex engine and the backend part, 
which includes font management and graphics. For tex itself, some 16-32 M 
is already a big tex. The additional font/inclusion stuff is partially 
written in C and i suppose that that piece uses dynamic mem allocation.

We run pretty large jobs here (thousands of pages, with many graphics) 
using a pretty big macro collection, and i have no problems running that in 
machines ranging from 32M to 256M. I remember that on a 32M machine running 
two jobs was no problem (apart from windows 95 being not that good in 
multitasking).

I don't know the requirements of teh xpdf lib used, but i can imagine that 
esp object management and caching puts some demands on teh system.

Hans

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