[13659] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.7M: latex/tex
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karen Walrath)
Thu Jul 13 00:37:53 1995
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: cluster-managers@MIT.EDU, jis@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 00:37:16 EDT
From: Karen Walrath <karen@MIT.EDU>
System name: lees13
Type and version: KN02ca 7.7M (1 update(s) to same version)
Display type: PMAG-DV
What were you trying to do?
Run latex and not have it take forever.
What's wrong:
There is a problem with latex/tex on the Decstations. The problem is
specifically with Tex version 3.141. Tex version 3.0 on older
decstation platforms works fine and the problem does not exist on the
Sun platforms.
Take for example, my thesis. On a sun, it takes 21.62 seconds of
user time and 7.2 seconds of system time to latex. On a decstation,
the user time will be comparable, but the system time will be
excessive. On a freshly booted decstation, just the system time will
be on the order of 25 seconds. This will get worse with time.
On lees13 (a decstation in my lab), a week after a reboot, it was
taking 90 seconds of system time. Running top concurrent with the
latex showed that the system was spending over 95% of its processing
power in system mode. The first decstation I used in the "fishbowl"
took over 100 seconds of system time. When lees13 was at its "worst",
it took about 275 seconds of system time to latex the thesis.
The problem is apparent just by typing 'tex'. When lees13 was taking
90+ seconds of system time on my thesis, it was taking 10 seconds just
to print the ** prompt in tex.
This problem does not happen on the dialups, and they have local
system packs. The problem is fixed when all of /usr/athena/lib/tex
and /usr/athena/bin/{tex, latex, virtex} are copied into the
/var/server hierarchy so that tex and all of its font files are on the
local disk. (It doesn't help to put just the tex program on the local
disk, all of the fonts must be there too. I never tried it with the
font files on the local disk, but with the tex programs on the srvd.)
The system time used is then comparable to a Sun.
Is latex/tex 3.141 doing something strange in its file accesses that is
causing afs to choke and leave cruft in memory? Note that tex 3.0
runs like a champ.
What should have happened:
Well, the system time to run latex shouldn't depend too much on
whether the tex files are on the system packs or a local disk.
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
Man pages on top and time?
