Re: [Groff] groff performance in respect to hardware platform

[Damian McGuckin]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, Steve Izma wrote:

> I assume that another way of asking this: "is groff
> multithreaded?" I don't know enough about this kind of
> programming to answer this by looking at the source code.

Not as far as I know.

> I'm only considering this in a Linux environment (Debian stable, fairly 
> recent kernel).
>
> I suppose another factor is that since the Linux kernel is built for
> parallelization, even if groff can only run on a single core,
> all the operating system services can run on other cores without
> interfering with groff's process.

Correct.

> Or do I not know what I'm talking about here?

You DO know what you are talking about.

> When I typeset large books, there are some stages, like adjusting track 
> kerning on a page, where I want to see immediate results on my viewer.

Viewing is something entirely different.

Your 'groff' produces Postscript and you can either view the Postscript in 
whatever suits, or convert it to PDF and just use a PDF viewer.

> My current hardware uses a five-year-old four-core CPU. A section of 
> text maybe 50 pages long will update in my viewer in less than two 
> seconds. But trying to do this for a 250-page book is tedious.

It is the rendering of the output that takes the time, not the 'groff' 
processing. Actually you might also have to think about your graphics 
display speed. You probably need to be asking questions of the maintainers 
of the viewer that you are using, not 'groff'.

> That's why I'm interested in processing speed.

Regards - Damian

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