[tex-k] Speed of kpsewhich when querying the repertories of the TeX installation

[jfbu]

Le 01/05/2015 09:18, Norbert Preining a écrit :
> One more thing:
>
>>> If I resuscitated this issue after some months, it is because I
>>> discovered yesterday that Emacs/AUCTeX 11.88 on Mac OS X very
>>> lengthy launch was entirely to be explained by its nine calls to
>>> kpsewhich.
>
> I have read through the linked thread you provided, and it is *not*
> clear to me that the failure is at kpsewhich side. Other people
> have responded with no problem.
>


Hi Norbert

there were only two other guys apart from me and Tassilo
(and David Kastrup) on this thread.

The OP was on Windows 8 and he has not commented since. I would
be very curious to know what was his issue, which may well be
completely unrelated to the Mac OS X/kpsewhich thing.

The other guy on Mac, I am not sure he really has AucTEX 11.88
He has not provided any usable information.

Again, during the fall of 2014, Adam Maxwell got even worse results
than my 2012 Mac Book Air with Mavericks. And he felt compelled
into profiling kpsewhich and obtained a 6 fold speed improvement.

> Could it be that on the Mac somehting else happens, that makes
> kpsewhich actually *search* the hard drive instead of using ls-R?
> If there are some lonesome // or missing ls-R or whatever,
> this can really create problems, but that is not a problem
> of kopsewhich.

I have vanilla TL2014 or TL2015 with no fiddling of texmf.cnf
files at all, aside from setting up the location of the local
tree and of the home tree and of the home var tree

TEXMFLOCAL = /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local-2014
TEXMFHOME = ~/Library/texmf
TEXMFVAR = ~/Library/texlive/2014/texmf-var
TEXMFCONFIG = ~/Library/texlive/2014/texmf-config

in /usr/local/texlive/2014/texmf.cnf.

Nothing else changed.

Same for the pretest of TL2015.

Recall that Adam Maxwell divided by 6 the running time
of kpsewhich on Mac OS X, thus on TL2015 the situation
is less acute.

But still, 1/10th of a second for each call.

Best

Jean-François