Arch Linux

Andy3153

Member

Registered: 2018-12-24

Posts: 89

TeX Live seems to be running really really slowly?

So, I reinstalled my system, and any LaTeX compiler seems to be running really slowly?
For example, this document, a very, very simple document:

\documentclass[
 12pt,
 a4paper
]{article}

\title{Title}
\author{Example}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
 \maketitle
\end{document}

Takes...:

$ time pdflatex example.tex

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.24 (TeX Live 2022/Arch Linux) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./example.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-11-15> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2022-04-10>
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/10/04 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-pdftex.def)
No file example.aux.
[1{/var/lib/texmf/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}] (./example.aux) )</usr/
share/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.pfb></usr/share/texmf-dis
t/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr17.pfb>
Output written on example.pdf (1 page, 20759 bytes).
Transcript written on example.log.
pdflatex example.tex  112,70s user 6,77s system 99% cpu 2:00,05 total

2 minutes? For such a blank document? What is going on? I have installed `texlive-most` like on my previous install. And things were, of course, much, much faster. This is an 11th gen i7, this has no right to run this slowly

This also happens with XeLaTeX, which I originally wanted to use. It's even worse:

$ time xelatex example.tex

This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999994 (TeX Live 2022/Arch Linux) (preloaded? format=xelatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./example.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-11-15> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2022-04-10>
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/10/04 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-xetex.def)
No file example.aux.
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/ts1cmr.fd) [1] (./example.aux) )
Output written on example.pdf (1 page).
Transcript written on example.log.
xelatex example.tex  180,51s user 11,01s system 99% cpu 3:12,71 total

3 minutes? I think this runs worse than it ran when they wrote TeX on the PDP-10, really now

Just to be sure I'm not insane, I tried Tectonic, and it runs like it should:

$ time tectonic example.tex

Running TeX ...
Rerunning TeX because "example.aux" changed ...
Running xdvipdfmx ...
Writing `example.pdf` (5.41 KiB)
Skipped writing 1 intermediate files (use --keep-intermediates to keep them)
tectonic example.tex  0,22s user 0,07s system 92% cpu 0,309 total

So, what is happening? Did I miss a step or something? It shouldn't matter, but the only differences from my previous install is that now  I am running a LVM on LUKS system and I'm using Btrfs. But searching for anything related to this didn't bring any results. I remember it was pretty much plug and play the first time I installed TeX Live. So, is there anything I can do? And, should I post this somewhere else?

Last edited by Andy3153 (2022-10-11 06:41:15)

dw

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2006-11-25

Posts: 160

Re: TeX Live seems to be running really really slowly?

i just tried this out and cannot reproduce.

pdflatex:

$ time pdflatex example.tex
....
real    0m0,171s
user    0m0,157s
sys     0m0,013s

xelatex:

$ time xelatex example.tex
...
real    0m0,439s
user    0m0,377s
sys     0m0,061s

tectonic

$ time tectonic example.tex
...
real    0m0,418s
user    0m0,370s
sys     0m0,046s

have you already tried to put the example.tex somewhere else? is any partition (e.g /tmp) full? i guess you already have stumbled upon https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244040 which also might be an issue...

I would also try to run

strace pdflatex example.tex

perhaps you can identify the issue this way.

Last edited by dw (2022-10-11 12:15:16)

Andy3153

Member

Registered: 2018-12-24

Posts: 89

Re: TeX Live seems to be running really really slowly?

have you already tried to put the example.tex somewhere else? is any partition (e.g /tmp) full? i guess you already have stumbled upon https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244040 which also might be an issue...

I actually didn't find that while doing my research to solve the issue by myself. And, his solution helped. I did some home cleanup with environment variables, and I made the mistake of setting, for example $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to '$HOME/.config'. And, $HOME already contains a slash at the end. So, our problems were caused by the same thing, two forward slashes in a path, and checking `kpsexpand \$TEXINPUTS` like in his answer really helped.

I now fixed my environment variables. Before:

export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache"\
       XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config"\
       XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share"\
       XDG_STATE_HOME="$HOME/.local/state"

And after:

export XDG_CACHE_HOME="${HOME}.cache"\
       XDG_CONFIG_HOME="${HOME}.config"\
       XDG_DATA_HOME="${HOME}.local/share"\
       XDG_STATE_HOME="${HOME}.local/state"

In case you were wondering what home folder cleanup I did:

export TEXMFHOME="$XDG_DATA_HOME/texmf/"\
       TEXMFVAR="$XDG_CACHE_HOME/texlive/texmf-var"\
       TEXMFCONFIG="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/texlive/texmf-config"\
       VARTEXFONTS="$XDG_CACHE_HOME/texlive/2011/texmf-var/fonts"

dw

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2006-11-25

Posts: 160

Re: TeX Live seems to be running really really slowly?

great that you were able to solve the issue and props to also putting the (final) solution here into the forums. thx!

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: TeX Live seems to be running really really slowly?

If $HOME contains a trailing slash, then whatever is setting the variable is broken. Did you manually set the user home while creating the user with useradd? That probably needs fixing, because it might break a whole lot of things in the long run.