[OS X TeX] Speed of TeX on OSX

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

This is a very general question/remark, but hopefully, somebody will be
able to explain things to me. I've been using TeX (specifically,
ConTeXt) on OS X for quite a while now and am extremely satisfied both
with the esthetic qualities of the results and the consistency of use
(after a somewhat steep learning curve). Recently, I installed Gentoo
Linux on a second drive in my G5 and have been playing around with
Linux. I get mixed results - just making a printer or scanner work is a
major pain. One thing, however, is quite amazing: the speed of TeX in
Limux is mind-blowing when compared to OS X. When I typeset the same
documents, I consistently use only 30-40 % of the time it takes to
typeset them on OS X. My TeX installation in Linux is more or less
identical to what I have on OS X: I installed teTeX and copied over my
~/texmf tree from OS X to my Linux-partition. I always assumed it just
took between 40 and 80 seconds to compile large documents (50,000-80,000
words) in ConTeXt, but now I see that this can be done a LOT faster.
Does anyone have an explanation for this difference in speed?

Best

Thomas

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