[pdftex] pdflatex 1.40.5 slow to start on Cygwin

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Theo Hopman writes:

 > 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.

I recently compiled the TeXLive binaries but never tested them.  It's
pdftex version 1.40.4.  Maybe Martin can tell you whether the pool
file has changed in version 1.40.5.  If not, you can try

    http://ms25.ath.cx/pdftex.exe.gz

I forgot to copy the pool files to the USB stick, sorry.  I'm
wondering why I copied the binaries at all because I can't do anything
with them at home.

BTW, before you begin to study large .fls files, you can test more
simple things.  For instance

     pdftex -ini \\dump

doesn't load a format file.  If this is slow, maybe pdftex has
problems finding the pool file or texmf.cnf.

Then you could try 

     pdftex \\end

which doesn't make much more than to load a format file.

What also comes to my mind: Check your environment variables!  No
TeX-related environment variable is required.  This is a nasty thing
on Cygwin because Cygwin inherits the Windows environment.

This means that you'll definitely run into trouble if you have another
TeX distribution on Windows which makes use of environment variables.

I doubt that this is the problem because you said that you just
replaced the binary.  But it makes sense to check this anyway.
Curious things can happen.  My first attempt to compile TeXLive failed
because Cygwin appends UNIX directories to the Windows path.  I had to
set PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin explicitly on Cygwin in order to
get it compiled.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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