HAN@FRECP12.BITNET (Jay Thierry HAN) (04/21/91)
Hello,
In my struggling to improve my system's performance, I happened to
wonder whether emTeX's font library (FLI) scheme was actually faster or
slower than the more traditional subdirectory tree.
Do the DVI drivers spend more time locating a specific font definition
when they use FLI's rather than have subdirectories with PK files in them?
I thought having a directory tree with names following the resolution/size
would make it easier for the DVI drivers to find the font files. Speed is
crucial to DVISCR, and I'm seeking any reasonable way to speed it up...
Thanks for any hint/idea/comment.
J. Han.rjl@monu1.cc.monash.oz ( r lang) (05/02/91)
In article <85751DEB000003B1@Post-Office.UH.EDU> HAN@FRECP12.BITNET (Jay Thierry HAN) writes: > In my struggling to improve my system's performance, I happened to >wonder whether emTeX's font library (FLI) scheme was actually faster or >slower than the more traditional subdirectory tree. With dvips (which is not part of emTeX), I found that font libraries were marginally slower than using separate pk files (less than 5% slower). This is based on a test I did when I was adding font library support to dvips. This speed difference will most likely differ on other systems - on my system the font libraries and font files are on a cached disk of a Novell Netware server. When dvips starts up, it reads the directory of each font library and holds the contents in memory. Each font library is left open. When a particular font is wanted, it is found by searching memory for the font location, and then doing an fseek on the already open font library. To read a particular pk font file, dvips must search for the file, open it, read it and then close it again. There is not much difference in terms of speed. Advantages of font libaries: - it is easier to move 7 files instead of 400 files - font libraries take up less directory entries on the disk Advantages of PK files: - pk files are easier to maintain if you are making your own fonts - a subset of commonly used pk files will take up less space than font libaries (with all fonts). > Do the DVI drivers spend more time locating a specific font definition >when they use FLI's rather than have subdirectories with PK files in them? >I thought having a directory tree with names following the resolution/size >would make it easier for the DVI drivers to find the font files. But the FLI's already have an internal directory with size and name, and DVISCR will store this in memory. I don't think you will get any significant speed increase by changing to PK files. -- Russell Lang Email: rjl@monu1.cc.monash.edu.au Phone: (03) 565 3460 Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering Monash University, Australia