In 2005 I put together a 64-staff score running 250 measures of music (for untuned percussion). The LilyPond version was 2.7.x and the compile time was 15 or 20 minutes on an Intel iMac running OS 10.4.something with 1.5 GB ram and a 1.83 Ghz processor. Not super fast, but certainly acceptable; the score compiled and I've been distributing the resulting PDFs for years.
Going back to that exact score *on the same machine* now hangs at "Preprocessing graphical objects ...". I've let the process run to more than an hour on two separate occasions with no end in sight. I'm writing now to ask if there's a way to speed things up. But because the question has been asked before, I'll first collect what I think are the important parts from the archive and then add comments towards the end.
... Michael Käppler asked this same question and Mark Polesky suggested turning off point-and-click and also pointed to keep-inside-line. I am indeed compiling with point-and-click *turned off*. However, when I click over to ...
... the language in the LM is somewhat ambiguous as to whether keep-inside-line settings speed things up or slow things down.
QUESTION: I have to assume that keep-inside-line is relatively expensive and that the recommendation in the LM is to *NOT* use the keep-inside-line settings, yes?
... but I found no concrete suggestions in this thread similar to Mark's suggestions in the previous thread.
* * *
I guess the reason I'm writing in to ask the question is that I feel that something has changed for the worse since the early versions of Lily I used on the score in 2005. The score most definitely did compile back then. But now the process won't finish. And this is on precisely the same machine. Memory and processor have stayed constant; only incremental updates for OS 10.4.x have been applied in the interim.
As a potential clue, top shows Lily consuming most all of the CPU:
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE < 12 or 15 entries omitted >
(The even amount of 650M virtual memory that the OS is giving to Lily makes me think that perhaps that number could or should be increased to a gig or even more, given that the system has a gig and a half installed, mostly sitting idle. But a few minutes of Googling around suggests to me that user allocation of virtual memory either isn't possible or isn't documented under OS X; perhaps I'm wrong here?)
Regardless, I feel like the answer here isn't either more physical memory or more virtual memory, due to successful compilation on the same machine in 2005.
(As a postscript, I also have #(define page-breaking ly:minimal-breaking) set in the score because I set all breaks and vertical spacing by hand. I know that certain changes that Joe's made to dramatically improve vertical spacing cane be time consumptive in some cases, so maybe this is a precaution to ward against that. However, the setting produces no obvious increase in performance, which makes me think that vertical spacing has nothing to do with the performance difference I'm experiencing.)
Anyone have any last suggestions for places to look or things to check?