[OS X TeX] Benchmarks on various machines

[Geoff Vallis]

Dear All,

Below, for those interested, are some benchmarks for typesetting a  
750 page book on various Macs. The book is technical, with lots of  
equations and figures. The figures exist in both EPS form, for latex,  
and PDF form, for PDFlatex. The times given are elapse time in  
seconds, rounded to integers, so smaller is better. Typesetting is  
done from the terminal.

The G4 is a Powerbook, at 1.4 Mhz. The G5 is a dual processor tower,  
at 2.5 Ghz. The Macbook is dual processor, core duo, at 2.GHz. The  
Imac is dual processor, core 2 duo, at 2.16 Ghz. The laptops have 1GB  
ram, the desktops 2GB. The 'no-log' column refers to the case when  
terminal output was suppressed, by redirecting it to /dev/null. This  
made a big difference on the single processor machine, but a small  
difference on the other machines. At the bottom is the actual output  
from some of cases, using the 'time' command. The first figure in  
each column (e.g. 8.876u) is the CPU time, and the third figure is  
the elapse time.

If anyone wants to see the actual book, which is a graduate-level  
fluid mechanics book using the lucida family of fonts for both text  
and mathematics, go to:
   http://www.princeton.edu/~gkv/aofd

Finally, let me thank everyone on the list for help over the years.  
This made the writing of the book, or at least figuring out how to  
typeset it nicely, much easier. I'm afraid I've been a sponge and not  
a spigot of information!

Regards
Geoff Vallis

P.S. I only subscribe to the digest, so if anyone has any comments or  
questions please cc me.


------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------

             Latex  Latex (no log)  PDFLatex  PDFLatex (no log)

G4 single     36      21             56        34	

G5 dual       10      9              17        16

Intel Imac    7       6              13        13

Macbook       10      8              18        16

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------

                       CPU           Elapse
G5 latex:            8.876u 0.360s 0:09.38 98.4%    0+0k 0+3io 0pf+0w

G5 pdflatex:        14.952u 1.101s 0:16.65 96.3%    0+0k 0+26io 0pf+0w

G4 latex:           18.096u 0.780s 0:36.39 51.8%    0+0k 0+143io 0pf+0w
           (no log)  17.456u 0.643s 0:20.84 86.8%    0+0k 0+128io 0pf+0w

G4 pdflatex:        28.676u 2.075s 0:56.48 54.4%    0+0k 0+33io 0pf+0w
           (no log)  28.295u 1.881s 0:33.91 88.9%    0+0k 2+34io 0pf+0w

Imac latex:          6.233u 0.174s 0:06.68 95.8%    0+0k 0+18io 0pf+0w

Imac pdflatex:      12.323u 0.674s 0:13.38 97.0%    0+0k 0+19io 0pf+0w


Macbook latex:       9.754u 0.236s 0:10.05 99.3%    0+0k 0+12io 0pf+0w
Macbook pdflatex:   17.606u 0.791s 0:18.50 99.4%    0+0k 0+12io 0pf+0w

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------

------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/