Ultilising multiple cores to compile a large complex document?

Question

I have been toying with a rather large old book (~980 pages). The book also has multiple complex figures made using pgfplots, glossaries, references... the works. When compiling the book, it takes my laptop a good while until it is finally compiled and the pdf is ready. I was wondering if it is possible to leverage the multiple cores of my laptop to make the compiling faster.

I am currently compiling my document from the terminal using the command:

pdflatex Maryland_2050.tex

I tried using the command

pdflatex -j 4 Maryland_2050.tex

to try and make pdflatex use all 4 cores of my laptop. But this merely created another set files with the name 4 and couldn't find any significant improvement in the time compilation time.

Details of my system:

I am using MxLinux 5.16.0-5mx-amd64
pdfTeX 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.24 (TeX Live 2022)
My laptop has 4 cores with 2 threads per cpu.

No, multiple threads won't help you, see Latex compilers with parallel support. However, if you're using pgfplots there might be significant improvements to be found from using the external library of pgfplots — Dai Bowen, Mar 25 '23 at 17:21
apart from the fact that pdftex is single threaded it's hard to see where threading could help much, pdf is an agressively linear format with objects located by byte offsets from the start, — David Carlisle, Mar 25 '23 at 19:20

Ultilising multiple cores to compile a large complex document?

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