TeX Live performance issues on CIFS mount.

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Max,

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020, Max Philippens | Secura wrote:
> RHEL 7.7 TeXLive 2019 (from online install):
> On CIFS: 0m4.174s
> On Local Disk: 0m0.248s

> It seems like something has changed between the 2017 version of TeX
> Live and the 2018 version that makes running on CIFS mounts
> painstakingly slow.

The TeX Live guide [1] lists
	Kpathsea: Case-insensitive filename matching now done by default
	in non-system directories; set texmf.cnf or environment variable
	texmf_casefold_search to 0 to disable. Full details in the
	Kpathsea manual (http://tug.org/kpathsea).

The details are explained in [2] Casefolding search
	In Kpathsea version 6.3.0 (released with TeX Live 2018), a new
	fallback search was implemented on Unix-like systems, including
	Macs: for each path element in turn, if no match is found by the
	normal search, and the path element allows for checking the
	filesystem, a second check is made for a case-insensitive match.

If you just want to go back, set, as described above, the texmf.cnf
variable or env variable
	texmf_casefold_search=0
that should bring it back to the previous speed.

[1] https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-850009.1.15
[2] https://tug.org/texinfohtml/kpathsea.html#Casefolding-search


Hope that helps

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + IFMGA ProGuide + TU Wien + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Dev
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