[tex-live] Tlmgr closing takes fairly long

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-05-30 at 13:55:49 +0200, Uwe Siart wrote:

 > Bernhard Kleine <bernhard.kleine at gmx.net> writes:
 > 
 > > On my win7 box, closing the tlmgr (pretest and all before) takes
 > > at least 30 sec, in my mind very long. Is there a reason behind?
 > 
 > I've been observing this ever since. Just didn't care. As we know
 > from Java, platform independent programming environments (as is
 > Tcl/Tk) tend to be slow. Perhaps this is simply the price to pay
 > for platform independence.

It takes much less than a second to close tlmgr on Linux.  Hence it's
obviously a Windows issue.  Unless there is a program like strace for
Windows it's nearly impossible to find out what's going on.  Maybe one
could examine with Cygwin, but I fear that the problem can't be solved
anyway because a program has no influence on what happens after it's
finished.  Of course, the O/S has to close open files and reclaim
memory, but I don't know why this takes so much time on Windows.
Creating new processes is also very slow on Windows.

BTW, Tcl/Tk is not slow because it's a platform independent
programming environment, it's slow because Tcl is an interpreted
language.  Most other scripting languages pre-compile the code before
it's executed.  This makes a very big difference. 

I don't know anything about Java, but I've been told that current
implementations are quite fast.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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