Re: [Texmacs-dev] Usability of TeXmacs on 2 year old computers

[David Allouche]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 01:35:24PM +0100, Álvaro Tejero Cantero wrote:
>
> I have 256Mb RAM, what else could be affecting performance?. Does
> anybody else feel that optimized TeXmacs on PIII =>500Mhz is not fast
> enough?.

TeXmacs is not *that* memory hungry. Unless your system is constantly
swapping I would not point lack of memory as a cause of slowdown.

I have little experience with big documents, but when I do type some,
I generally find the slowdown (on PIII-700) no longer acceptable about
10 to 20 pages, and I generally use little to no math.

One thing I noticed is that typing text at the end is generally O(1)
of the size of the document, but that typing text at the start of the
document seems to be O(N).

I believe there may be a stupid performance bug somewhere causing big
updates after the cursor when they are not needed.


> Does anybody have any clues as to what to do? At the moment I cannot
> afford a faster computer. 

On the document level:

  -- use inclusions to reduce the size of the edited document;

  -- use a special stylesheet for editing, especially if your normal
     stylesheet uses multicol text.

On the code:

We (Steph and I) believe that unnecessary refcounting (esp while
passing arguments) is a major cause of slowdown because it breaks the
processor cache. Yet it was not possible to find a way to fix that
which suited Joris stylistic preferences.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.