[pdftex] pdflatex 1.40.5 slow to start on Cygwin

[George N. White III]

On 9/24/07, Theo Hopman <hopman.theo at gmail.com> wrote:

> [As requested, I'm transferring this discussion to the mailing list.]
>
> My original support request was:
> ---8<---
> I use Cygwin on WinXP pro, with teTex 3.0 installed. I
> recently built pdftex 1.40 (which went well), manually
> replaced the old binaries of pdftex, and rebuilt the
> various formats using fmtutil. Now, however, pdflatex
> starts up only after a considerable delay (anywhere
> from a couple of seconds up to half a minute). While
> pdflatex sits there looking like its doing nothing, it
> also responds slowly to interrupt (^C) signals. Why
> might this be? `pdflatex --version`, by contrast, is
> instantaneous, so the issue is likely something to do
> with searching or loading formats.
> ---8<---
>
> Further information:
> - pdftex is slow building formats
> - kpswhich works as quickly as before the pdftex upgrade
> - CPU usage is low (90% idle) while pdftex delays
> - no network directories are in search path
> - entire texmf tree is on local hard drive
> - search paths were not changed with upgrade to 1.40
> - behaviour is same in Terminator terminal and Windows console
> - use of -recorder shows no unexpected (to me) locations being
> accessed. Of course, I'm not an expert. I've attached the .fls files.

I don't see any obvious problems with the .fls files.

The next step is to do some profiling.   There have been performance
isses on cygwin for octave related to malloc (which didn't show up
directly in the profiling):

http://velveeta.che.wisc.edu/octave/lists/archive//octave-maintainers.2004/msg00334.html

You might want to check those benchmarks with current cygwin.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia