following trivial observation i made (several runs): $ time pdfetex samplepdf real 0m2.536s real 0m2.605s real 0m2.737s real 0m2.654s $ time pdfetex samplepdf | buffer real 0m0.900s real 0m1.035s real 0m0.900s real 0m0.913s the speed gain is impressive here, also with other files from daily business and for longer runs. Same if i write $ pdfetex samplepdf > xxx So at least here pdfetex spends lots of time just for unbuffered talk to the terminal. And it's faster with a smaller window. Maybe we should think of implementing buffered writing? See e. g. man 3 setbuf. The problem is that it should fflush() in case of errors and switch to unbuffered. And maybe it should fflush() also after a certain time of say 0.5 s, which would require select(). Has anybody similar statistics? Regards, Hartmut