Are there LaTeX performance profiling tools?

Question

The most obvious way to speed up LaTeX processing is to split a large and complex document into smaller pieces. For example, Makefiles, \beginpgfgraphicnamed/\endpgfgraphicnamed when using TiKZ, and splitting a large file into separate chapters are all helpful in splitting a large job into smaller, hopefully independent pieces. But sometimes this is not enough -- many packages do complicated things under the hood, leading to slow document processing.

Are there any tools to help isolate the culprits?

It would be great to also have the profiling tool provide suggestions on ways to speed things up.

You kids today are so spoiled. My first PC, a 386 with 1M of RAM was underpowered to run LaTeX and a run on my class handouts would typically take 30 minutes or more to typeset a dozen pages. We never profiled anything cause it was ALL slow. — Don Hosek, Mar 05 '20 at 22:08
See also profiling - Package loading speeds - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange & maybe macros - How to implement (low-level) arrays in TeX - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange for some discussion how to write fast TeX code as a TeX programmer. — user202729, Jun 27 '22 at 06:20

score 21 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 29 '10 at 06:08

pdfTeX (which is the default nowadays, even if you're generating DVI) has functions for doing timing tests. Use \pdfresettime to start it off and do ‘something’ with \pdfelapsedtime when you're done:

\documentclass{article}
\pdfresettimer
\usepackage{expl3,tikz}
\showthe\pdfelapsedtime
\begin{document}
\end{document}

The value of \pdfelapsedtime is the number of seconds elapsed multiplied by 65536.

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 27 '10 at 06:16

Perhaps not quite what you're after, but the trace package is used by the LaTeX Project to get a feel for the 'cost' of different things. This package lets you include every TeX expansion and assignment in the log file. So you can check how many lines a particular function adds to the log, which gives you an idea of how hard TeX is working to do whatever you've asked for. Other than that, the approach I take is to create simple test files (say one with a loop to repeat one function many times), then use 'time' at the command line to see what changes as I alter the input.

Note. There's the (relatively) new l3benchmark library, although I'm not sure how to use it — user202729, Mar 31 '22 at 01:35

score 10 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 29 '13 at 22:09

10

tikz/pgf seems to provide a general profiler built on top of \pdfelapsedtime to optimise TeX code. See "44 Profiler Library" in its manual from a recent CVS checkout. The stable release pgf 2.0 is out of date.

edited Mar 29 '13 at 22:09

Dave Jarvis

11,809

answered Aug 11 '10 at 09:47

Leo Liu

5,445

For anyone still wondering in '21, this should probably be the accepted answer, as pgf/TikZ provide a profiler library which does exactly what OP asked. Profiling of individual commands and environments has to be declared manually but the output is provided in the log and in a special output file. This allows you to profile à la MATLAB. – Jonas Zaugg Aug 17 '21 at 09:25
https://mirror.kumi.systems/ctan/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf (currently 67 Profiler Library) – janniks Sep 17 '21 at 15:19

Are there LaTeX performance profiling tools?

3 Answers3

Linked

Related