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Is it everybody's experience that LaTeX documents compile much more slowly on Windows 7 than on Linux generally, all things being equal?

Is speed of compilation affected by the LaTeX editor I use, or Tex distribution?

System: Win 7 32/64-bit | Xubuntu 11.04 32-bit | Kubuntu 64-bit

Editor of choice: TexWorks

lockstep
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ptrcao
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    I very much doubt that the editor, or the OS, has much (if anything) to do with it. Influential factors would be the compiler used, ambivalent load of OS at time of compilation, and speed of PDF viewer. Most of the time, statements like "OS XYZ is slower at ABC" are like "cars are better than planes because I can't fly to work". ;-) – DevSolar Sep 30 '11 at 09:16
  • It can be related to antivirus software, and the os can influence it with its caching. You could try tex live on windows if you are currently using miktex. – Matthias Pospiech Sep 30 '11 at 11:53
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    In the case of LuaTeX and using some complicated fonts like Arno Pro or Garamond Premier, the OS does play a row as the file system performance affect the fonts loading process, which could be the dominate factor in some cases. – Yan Zhou Sep 30 '11 at 15:44
  • IIRC, there was some discussion about the opposite effect some months ago (can't find the question anymore). – Caramdir Sep 30 '11 at 21:37
  • This is such an open-ended 'question' that it really does not fit into the format here. 'All things being equal' is pretty hard to ensure, and so unless you build a test system with carefully-tailored software I don't see what there is to say. – Joseph Wright Oct 02 '11 at 07:19
  • It might depend on different caching. Additionally i guess windows runs usually Antivir software in the background which will slow down file i/o. If you are interested in LaTeX benchmarks look here: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/latex-bench/ – Jonas Stein Oct 29 '12 at 02:49
  • it is for me, day and night, linux being the winner. I ran texlive 2018 on both, windows 10 takes over 30 seconds, whereas linux just about 3 seconds – Suppboi May 04 '18 at 01:35

1 Answers1

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"all things being equal": I've got no antivirus on my Linux machine, but kmail2 consumes lots of CPU-time. All kind of background processes might cost speed. So it seems quite difficult to compare let's say a texlive installation on Win7 to it on openSuse 11.4.

The editor should not affect speed, except for maybe fractions of a second.

That said: I'd be surprised if texlive had the same speed on both OS's, regardless of lenght of the document and the number of used packages. But to compare it, you'd have to test many documents and you'd have to take provisions to keep each OS from doing something like indexing the harddisk during compilations.

Keks Dose
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