[tex-live] Tlmgr closing takes fairly long

[Zdenek Wagner]

2016-05-30 23:38 GMT+02:00 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:

> 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.
>

It is even worse, Tcl lacks numeric variables. If you want to evaluate 3 +
2, first the string "3" is converted internally to a number, then the
string "2" is converted internally to a number, the expression is evaluated
to number 5 which is convertečd to string "5" and the string is stored.

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

Yes, it is fast but the GNU Java for Linux lacks GUI, Java for other
platforms is not freely redistributable, users will have to download and
install it themselves. It need not be trivial. A few month ago I found that
a Java app working fine on my Linux did not work on a Windows computer and
the error message was not useful. The reason was that the app required
standard classes that are not distributed with JRE but JDK is required. It
can easily be figured out by a Java expert but not by normal users, they
will just report that it does not work.

>
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
>



Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



>
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> Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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