TeX Live 2022: Compilation *very* slow on new Ubuntu installation compared with macOS on same machine

[Richard Stanton]

I just installed TeX Live 2022 on a newly installed Ubuntu 22.10 virtual machine running on my Mac Pro. Everything is running fine, except that compiling a TeX document is MUCH slower using pdfLaTeX on the Ubuntu VM compared with compiling the same file using MacTeX under macOS on the same machine.

As an example, I just compiled an 8-page document at the command line. It took 1 minute 50 seconds on Ubuntu, compared with about 2 seconds on macOS! You can see from the terminal window that the slowness is mainly in looking for all the sty files from the document preamble.

Any suggestions? This is a pretty much default installation and I’ve given the VM 4 cores and 32GB RAM, so it should have plenty of power.

Thanks!

Richard Stanton