tex-live performance

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Anton,

On Sat, 03 Apr 2021, Anton Ertl wrote:
> https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/franz/latex-bench
> https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/latex-bench/

Looks interesting.

> difference?  Other explanations are possible, e.g., the Debian texlive
> maintainers might build the Testing texlive package with less

No (I am also maintainer of TL in Debian), we use maximal optimization.

My guess is that it really depends - as Ulrike said - on the moving
targets. You are comparing different things, because there are different
levels:
- the actual engine (pdfetex, luatex)
- the format code (latex, context)
The first one doesn't change a lot. I think there has been only one
considerable code change in pdf*tex and that is related to how
case-sensitive/insensitive look-ups are treated. That could be - and in
some cases turned out to be - a source of increased instructions being
used.

Then there is the format, and since nowadays the LaTeX format has
evolved quite a lot over the last few years (just one thing - utf8 is
enabled by default) that can of course generate a lot of other activity.

So I guess the best would be - but that takes probably time and hacking
- to use the same format files across the tests. AFAIR between 2018 and
2020 it should be possible to use the latest files from 2020 and the
binaries from 2018 (if library wise it works - you could just drop the
pdfetex binary from 2018/debian stable into /usr/bin of testing and
rebuild the formats with fmtutil-sys --byengine pdfetex or similar).

That should give more comparable results at least what the binaries are
concerned.

Best

Norbert

(complang.tuwien ... gute alte Zeiten wie ich noch oft am jetztigen
Logic and Computation Institut Leitsch Zeiten war)

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu                 + IFMGA Guide + TU Wien + TeX Live + Debian Dev
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