Re: [NTG-context] Using ConTeXt-LMTX for modern Mathematically-Literate-Programming 1/2

On 3 Dec 2020, at 11:35, Stephen Gaito wrote:

Hans,

As I said my desktop is elderly... it has a 2.8GHz processor, 16Gb of DDR3 memory, and a couple of old SATA1 hard disks, and only 3Mb of CPU cache...

... all well past its use by date for single threaded ConTeXt. ;-(

So one way to get better performance for ConTeXt is to invest in a new ultra fast processor. Which will cost a lot, and use a lot of power which has to be cooled, which uses even more power....

Startup time can be improved quite a bit with an SSD. Even a cheap SATA SSD is already much faster than a traditional harddisk. Doesn’t help with longer documents, but it could be a fairly cheap upgrade. I can’t comment on how to speed up the rest of what you are doing, but generally multi-threading TeX typesetting jobs is so hard as to be impossible in practise. About the only step that can be split off is the generation of the PDF, and even there the possible gain is quite small (as you noticed already). Typesetting is a compilation job, so the two main ways to speed things along are 1) split the source into independent tasks, like in a code compiler that splits code over separate .c / .cpp / .m / .p etc. files, and then combine the results (using e.g. mutool) 2) precompile recurring stuff (in TeX, that would mean embedding separately generated pdfs or images) Best wishes, Taco