[pdftex] pdfTeX executable for Windows

[Jerzy B. Ludwichowski]

Hello,

In my application (university admissions) I have to generate several 
thousands of pdf pages with pdftex "while you wait" on a windows machine. The 
test run of over 6000 pages (and more might be wanted) takes about 4,5 
minutes CPU (there are tables involved) on an otherwise empty machine with a 
1GHz processor. I tried to look into shortening the time but it seems that we 
have to live with it.  Generating dvi pages is unsignificantly shorter but 
the total time to generate dvi and then to convert dvi into pdf with dvipdfm 
is even bigger than the direct route.

Here comes the problem: when spying on the performance of tex and pdftex I 
found that the pdftex executable (3.14159-1.00b-pretest-20020211 (Web2c 
7.3.7x) -- ancient :-( ) generates in my evironment around 1400-1600 page 
faults per second in the said run while tex does none!  This shouldn't be a 
problem when runing alone but might create disturbing disk traffic (swapping 
interference) in a multiuser environment (our case). Also, at times, several 
pdftex runs are needed simultaneously i.e., by user request which aggravates 
the situation. Both tex (26 MB) and pdftex (42 MB) fit totally into the main 
memory. 

There should be (?) something  that one should set/unset when creating the 
pdftex executable for windows which is done for tex and not done for pdftex, 
that creates the described efect.  

Any ideas/help?

Best regards,

Jerzy Ludwichowski

P.S. I didn't try a more recent version of pdftex :-(