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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers)
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: Speed of TeX and Scribe
Message-ID: <802@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 13-Jan-84 14:09:16 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.802
Posted: Fri Jan 13 14:09:16 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jan-84 06:03:33 EST
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From furuta@uw-june Fri Jan 13 11:09:11 1984
I found David Fuchs' timings to be of interest so I repeated some of them on
a lightly loaded VAX 780 running Berkeley Unix, 4.1bsd.  Once again, it
appears that Scribe and TeX run at fairly comparable speeds for this simple
benchmark (although, in both cases, it took more time than David's run on
his Unix 780).  Scribe, producing output for the GSI device took
	1:12 real, 58.5 user, and 3.1 system
Producing output for a file device took
	0:47 real, 41.6 user, and 2.6 system
Comparatively, TeX took
	1:03 real, 48.6 user, and 2.2 system

I then wondered where troff fit into this scheme.  I modified the input file
to put a ".br" between the paragraphs.  Troff ran without any macro packages
and without any of its preprocessors.  Hence, I would suspect that the
measurements would be highly biased towards troff.  However, the values
weren't that different.  Running a troff -t with the output sent to
/dev/null took
	0:45 real, 35.4 user, and 1.4 system
Running a nroff with the output going to a file took
	0:29 real, 21.6 user, and 1.2 system

One surprising difference, though, are the relative amounts of memory needed
for the runs.  Interestingly, TeX was smaller than Scribe although both were
pretty big---Scribe averaged somewhere around 205k bytes of program memory
space and somewhere between 172k and 220k bytes of data memory space.  TeX
took 137k of program memory space and 149k of data memory space.  Troff was
substantially smaller---25k program and between 23k and 25k data.

TeX's performance is particularly surprising to me because it uses the
Berkeley pc compiler *without* optimization although the i/o routines have
been replaced with C-language routines, speeding them up substantially.  I
believe that the Unix Scribe is machine translated from the Bliss to C.  Of
course troff was written directly in C.

Echoing David's comments; this benchmark is probably too simple to provide
realistic results.  I think it'd be quite interesting if someone tried
running comparisons using some more realistic files.  Any takers?

					--Rick