[tex-live] running programs from texlive tlc2

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Tigran Aivazian wrote:

> I have seen some reasonably complex books typeset in LaTeX which can 
> take about a month of computer time to be processed under Windows Xp 
> on a 2GHz with 1G RAM machine and took only a few hours on a Linux 
> Celeron 600MHz with 256M RAM.
>
I can't imagine what your books are like. I have been typesetting books 
for 20 years using LaTeX and I can't recall a LaTeX run for more than
an hour. I count 10 minutes these days as a really big TeX job.

> So, the Windows OS can make things tens if not hundreds of times slower

I find that a fairly extraordinary claim. What do you suggest the 
operating system may be doing
to hold up the processor, the disk, and the memory by that much? I have 
to assume that your LaTeX job
which takes so long is "computing", rather gthen vast amounts of disk access

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

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