[tex-live] Why is TeX so slow on Mac OS X?

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hans Hagen wrote:
> Gerben Wierda wrote:
> 
>> http://www.nslog.org/latex.html has a table. Even with an adapted 
>> command (disabling Terminal output which wins you 10 seconds or so on 
>> this run):
>>
>> time pdflatex source2e.tex >/dev/null
>>
>> real 0m17.377s
>> user 0m16.100s
>> sys 0m0.580s
>>
>> This 1.2GHz G4 is slow. A 1.4Ghz Pentium III, 1 GB RAM mit Debian 
>> Linux 3.0 clocks in at 7seconds or so.
>>
>> Why is TeX so slow? How do I find out what is going on?
>
> normally, on an i386 tex the speed of tex does not differ per operating 
> system (in any case, do a couple of runs to make sure that caching is 
> not playing any role)

But your bios settings can have a huge impact on a PC. Perhaps this is
true on G4's as well? (L2 cache, SDRAM speed, disk DMA yes/no). If you
can save that much time just by disabling output, perhaps there is some
I/O setting wrong?

Btw, here is the fastest of our office machines:

   4.06user 0.08system 0:04.21elapsed

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ (2Ghz), 1GB ram, 200GB disk, running
Mandrakelinux 10.1, Kernel 2.6.8.1-19mdk on a x86_64,


Greetings, Taco