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From: dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Benchmark comparison of two big TeXs for the PC
Message-ID: <1991May6.175345.1@euler.claremont.edu>
Date: 7 May 91 00:53:45 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 33


Well, I've finally gotten round to doing a benchmark to see how
much faster PCTeX is than emTeX. The file I tested is the current
revision of my LaTeX book (currently 128 pages). It's a nice test
in that it contains a little of just about everything. I compared
tex386b (PCTeX) to btex286 (emTeX) since the file is too
demanding to run in an ordinary TeX (or even the 128K TeX which
is the current PCTeX standard). The benchmarks were run in a
DESQview BigDOS window (modified to use 4DOS as the shell) which
was the only window open on my 25mHz 386 PC. I was running the
Hyperdisk DiskCache program with staged writes on. Care was taken
that both programs were tested under identical operating
conditions. The results: 
  tex386b:  4:13.21
  btex286: 14:46.39
A few notes. PCTeX still hasn't fixed the bug with 8-bit input
handling. It also is less forgiving of low memory conditions than
emTeX is (the benchmarks were run with 3500K of EMS available to
each program). Those of you needing a big TeX who have a
large-memory 386 (I'd say at least 4M for reasonable performance)
would do well to get the PCTeX version if you can live without
the eight-bit handling. 

-dh

-- 
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