[Tex/LaTex] Latex memory usage & CPU

installinglinux

I want to buy a VPS with some sort of Linux on it in order to run apache, LaTeX. I need to choose processor and ram. How much does LaTeX use? What will be an appropriate configuration to run LaTeX smoothly? I didn't know whever to put this question in ServerFault or not, but here seems more appropriate.

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From my experience, memory usage by LaTeX is the least of your worries. For instance, right now I have TeXShop and TeXWorks open and have quite a few files open, both combined are taking up about 150MB of memory, Firefox on the other hand is using 660MB. When I run LaTeX I don't even notice any difference in memory usage stats.

Now, I only have 2GB of RAM on my Mac, and feel that I need to remedy that, and if buying a new Mac, I'd probably get 8GB as I will need to run xcode.

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[Tex/LaTex] About texhash and proper installation of TeXlive

Why should I need texhash?

TeX has lots of tiny files, .tfm files for instance. So finding something involves a lot of disk activity. Texhash looks once and remembers the locations of all the files in a simple single-file database, and then when TeX programs need to find those files the only reading is of that database. Roughly, it remembers where your TeX-relevant files are.

The downside is that when you add or move files you need to run texhash.

Can I avoid installing as root on linux Mint/ubuntu (here they say you don't have to be root, that it's even discouraged)?

I have installed as not-root on Ubuntu. (At the moment, I use the debian packages though.) If you have a one-person system probably root is the easiest.

Should I somehow install texhash for root?

What does whereis texhash say? (Mine says /usr/bin/texhash.) What are the permissions? For comparision, mine says this.

ftpmaint@millstone:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/texhash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2011-05-25 08:01 /usr/bin/texhash -> mktexlsr
ftpmaint@millstone:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/mktexlsr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6885 2011-04-10 15:52 /usr/bin/mktexlsr

[Tex/LaTex] Strange PDF issue for Adobe Acrobat on Linux reading a document produced in latex

Evince displays the file (mostly) correctly, but complains about

matrix not invertible

The problem seems to be \arrow[scale=0]{>}. If you set it to a positive scale the above example displays correctly in Acrobat (and Evince doesn't complain anymore).

From the TikZ manual:

/tikz/scale=⟨factor⟩
Multiplies all coordinates by the given ⟨factor⟩. The ⟨factor⟩ should not be excessively large in absolute terms or very near to zero.

If you don't want any arrows on your lines, simply remove the [postaction={decorate}] options and the decoration declaration.

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Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] About texhash and proper installation of TeXlive

[Tex/LaTex] Strange PDF issue for Adobe Acrobat on Linux reading a document produced in latex

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