[tex-live] TeX Live 2004 final vs development

[Tigran Aivazian]

Hello,

I was using TeX Live 2004 development snapshots very happily and was not 
planning to upgrade to the final official version because those snapshots 
were only a few weeks old (the time when Karl Berry requested the re-build 
of binaries).

However, a friend of mine whom I advised to upgrade from TeX Live 2003 to 
TeX Live 2004 reported a huge performance increase for the sort of stuff 
he was doing (which is quite similar to my stuff as he is also doing 
Bibles, only interlinear russian-greek ones whilst mine are in greek and 
hebrew).

Now I am hesitating whether I should upgrade as well? The reason I am 
asking here is because sometimes (e.g. for Linux kernel development) the 
software contains various "debug checks" which are enabled during 
development and disabled in the final release which can cause a serious 
performance increase even though the software is otherwise exactly the 
same.

So, I am asking TeX Live experts --- are there any such things practiced 
here? I.e. could it be that the final official iso is much faster than a 
development snapshot taken almost immediately before because of such 
"debug code" being disabled?

Kind regards
Tigran