[luatex] LuaTeX precompilation

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2023-12-21 at 10:27:48 +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:

 > I stop here as I've written plenty about performance the last
 > decades in various docs,

Hi Hans,
please let me mention this though:

A few months ago I uncompressed the lualatex format file and
compressed it with lz4.  The lz4-compressed file was smaller than the
original format file.  Though I know that luatex doesn't use maximum
gzip compression, I didn't really expect this.

 26702648  lualatex.fmt-uncompressed
 12201683  lualatex.fmt
  9926586  lualatex.fmt.lz4

But what I absolutely didn't expect is that de-compression of lz4
files is about 7.5 times as fast as de-compression of the gzip'ed
format file.

In order to determine speed I directed the de-compressed output to
/dev/null because when writing to disk results differ much more
between successive runs and a format file is extracted in memory and
not written to disk.

Maybe it's worthwhile to keep an eye on lz4.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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