[XeTeX] performance on Windows machines

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Sep 2006, at 7:33 am, Akira Kakuto wrote:

>> To test performance with legacy TeX stuff (not OpenType, etc), I
>> sometimes run texbook.tex (with a suitable prefix file to make it
>> actually typeset). The Mac Pro takes about 1.1-1.2 seconds (real
>> time) to generate the 494-page PDF using xetex -output-
>> driver="xdvipdfmx -q -E". Wow! Actually, that's faster than pdftex
>> can do it. :)
>
> I'm amazed at the speed of xetex. XeTeX for W32 binary is
> not optimized, while pdftex for W32 is optimized:
>
> xetex --proctimes texbook
> Time statistics: user mode=2328 ms, kernel mode=125 ms, total=2453 ms.
>
> pdftex --proctimes texbook
> Time statistics: user mode=2828 ms, kernel mode=187 ms, total=3015 ms.

No, this isn't the whole story: --proctimes is (presumably) only  
reporting the time for the actual xetex process.

For a fair comparison, you also need to take xdvipdfmx into account,  
and that will make the total times for xetex somewhat greater than  
pdftex. But the actual "wall time" to complete the job can still be  
faster if you have a multiprocessor machine, because the two  
processes run in parallel on separate CPUs.

JK