| |||||||||||||
LinuxCon: A tale of two bootchartsLinuxCon: A tale of two bootchartsPosted Aug 26, 2010 22:47 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts by neilbrown Parent article: LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts
Emacs did that for a long time, then both Emacs and XEmacs shifted to a more explicit serialization mechanism (the resulting files are mmap()ed in, so still shared between instances IIRC), mostly because keeping unexec() working was a pain.
LaTeX never did the coredump trick because it wasn't originally written on a Unix system at all (hell, it's written in Pascal). It's always written out a serialized representation of its state ('format files') then loaded them later. I'm not sure how valuable this is for LaTeX proper anymore (who cares about a fraction of a second?) but it's very valuable for big formats like ConTeXt, which takes ages to load even on modern systems.
(Log in to post comments)
LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts Posted Sep 2, 2010 11:20 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
For LaTeX it is still of interest in special circumstances where one preloads classes and packages as well and then dumps the fmt file.
In a current project of mine, I was able to improve the format time of a document from 4 sec to 0.4 secs with usage of such a format file. It's not much for one document, but since (a) we're producing ca. 15 million documents a year and (b) this is also used in an interactive environment, such performance improvements were very well received by our users.
|
|||||||||||||