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

[Clarke Echols]

On 03/23/2016 09:21 PM, Steve Izma wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 08:25:50PM -0400, Larry Kollar wrote:
> > Subject: Re: [Groff] groff performance in respect to hardware platform

> I guess I need to re-state the question. I'm quite familiar with
> groff's speed, including with 1000-page (or larger) complex
> books. But I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if groff benefits
> from running on multiple CPU cores and multiple CPUs.
>
> 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.
>
> 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. Or do I not know what I'm
> talking about here?

I really don't think what you're looking for is significant enough to
bother with.  Groff is plenty fast enough.  I've been using troff then
groff since 1985, and I've never had a problem, even on 30-Mhz
Motorola 68000-series processors running 20-30 Mhz clocks.

My current system with a 3.3 Ghz Quad-core Intel I5-2500K never gets
in my way running Ubuntu, which is Debian based.

I suggest avoiding the paralysis of analysis.  You'll spend far more
time fretting about the issue than you'll ever lose in productivity
from processing delays.

It's all about balancing one kind of time against another, and I've
found it's far easier to "just do it" as the old Nike ads used to say.

Clarke