[XeTeX] How much time to build LaTeX format for XeTeX

[Joseph Wright]

On 06/12/2019 03:15, Doug McKenna wrote:
> Given all the parsing of the Unicode character data files during INITEX, and all the inputting and creation of the hyphenation trees, how much CPU time elapses while building the XeTeX format file for LateX?  I'm going to assume that the writing out of the format at the final \dump command is negligible, though I don't really know.
> 
> - Doug McKenna
> 

'Not very long': of the order of seconds. On my i5 Dell XPS, using an 
Ubuntu VM on top of Windows 10 "time fmtutil-sys -byfmt xelatex" gives

     real   0m2.154s
     user   0m1.314s
     sys    0m0.094s

My native system is slower: this is a known issue to do with file access 
on Windows. LuaTeX is about 0.5s faster, I guess largely as it does not 
load hyphenation patterns.

The LaTeX dev formats, which pre-load more data, take a little longer: 
for XeLaTeX-dev

     real   0m3.186s
     user   0m2.244s
     sys    0m0.090s

Joseph