TeX Live performance issues on CIFS mount.

[Max Philippens | Secura]

We ran into some performance issues building a machine for the specific
purpose of generating TeX reports. The data we use to generate the TeX
reports is located on a RHEL 7.7 machine wich we mount via a CIFS mount
on other machines.

Some measurments done on RHEL 7.7, testing has been done with pdflatex
on a small Hello World example:

RHEL 7.7 TeXLive 2019 (from online install):
On CIFS: 0m4.174s
On Local Disk: 0m0.248s

RHEL 7.7 TeXLive 2017 (from online install):
On CIFS: 0m0.199s
On Local Disk: 0m0.166s

We also tested with Ubuntu 18.04 with the packaged TeX Live version
(which is 2017), results are similair to the 2017 online install on the
RHEL 7.7 machine. Installing the 2019 online install on this machine
makes the generation slow down, similair to the RHEL results. We also
tested RHEL 8 with packaged version (which is 2018) with similair
results to the 2019 version. 

It seems like something has changed between the 2017 version of TeX
Live and the 2018 version that makes running on CIFS mounts
painstakingly slow.

Benchmarking the CPU and CIFS performance on these machine doesn't show
any possible issues. All tests have been carried out on the same
machines with the only difference the TeX Live versions used during the
test.
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