[Tex/LaTex] way to find out how long it took for the document to compile

compiling

I was thinking it'd be nice to know how much time each package I load adds on to the total time between clicking "compile" and seeing the PDF come up on my screen, so that I can figure out which ones I shouldn't load unless necessary. If there were a way of measuring the precise amount of time it takes to compile (i.e., have the computer measure it, not try to approximate it by hand with a stopwatch), I can just remove one package at a time and measure the differences. But I can't find a way of doing this; I hunted around in the "log" file and didn't see this info, and I couldn't find any packages that add this functionality.

Ultimately, I admit it's not that big of a deal – compiling usually only takes a second, maybe two – but now I'm curious how to do this, and it could be relevant in much larger documents (with longer compile times).

Best Answer

This is somewhat OS dependent. On Linux and OS X you can use the time command from the command line.

time pdflatex myfile.tex

returns: (e.g.)

real    0m1.976s
user    0m0.331s
sys     0m0.091s

There may be a similar command in Windows. Depending on your editing environment, you can probably modify the latex command from within the editor (temporarily) to run the time command when you compile, which would make checking the times for different package configurations easier.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to compile a LaTeX document

one way of doing this is using the command line by entering pdflatex yourfilename.tex (assuming MikTex is in your path - just give it a try).

Another way would include installing software such as TeXnicCenter or TeXworks which will let you open/edit/compile a .tex file from within an editor environment.

A third way could be to import it into LyX and then compile with LyX as usual.

Edit: See LaTeX Editors/IDEs.

[Tex/LaTex] How to prolong compilation time while engaging in leisure activities

With pdfTeX, add

\everypar{\ifnum\pdfelapsedtime<\maxdimen
  \the\expandafter\everypar\else\pdfresettimer\fi}

(after the \begin{document} if you are using pdfLaTeX). This will wait four hours and a half (\maxdimen scaled seconds, that is, 2^{30-16} seconds) before starting each paragraph. Replace \maxdimen by 65536 (and a space) to get a one second delay at each paragraph. Compiling a book with, say, 1000 paragraphs takes about six months. Not bad for a 90 characters addition.

With a bit more code (184 characters), an engine-agnostic implementation of the Ackermann function lets us get pretty much any delay by changing the arguments of \A just a little bit (I am not sure at what point TeX's limits are exceeded). With

\def\A#1#2{\the\numexpr\B{#1}{#2+1}\empty
  {\A{#1-1}{\B{#2}1\empty{\A{#1}{#2-1}}.}}.\relax}
\def\B#1{\ifnum\numexpr#1=0 \C\else\C\fi}
\def\C#1#2#3#4#5.{#1#3#4}
\everypar{{\count0=\A{3}{1}}}

I add about 6 minutes per paragraph to the compilation time on my machine. An additional benefit of this answer is that the definitions can easily be scattered in the preamble to avoid detection. Using xint lets us manipulate larger numbers, hence give larger arguments to \A:

\usepackage{xint}
\def\C#1#2#3#4#5.{#1#3#4}
\def\b#1{\if0\s{#1}\C\else\C\fi}
\let\s\xintSgn
\let\d\romannumeral
\let\x\xintAdd
\def\a#1#2{\b{#1}{\x{#2}1}\empty{%
    \a{\x{#1}{-1}}
    {\d-`-\b{#2}1\empty{\a{#1}{\d-`-\x{#2}{-1}}}.}}.}
\everypar{\d-\xintSgn{\A{3}{1}} }

This last code is not tested: xint puts an overhead on TeX's arithmetic, which makes the whole thing way too slow. Slower, even, would be to use the bigintcalc package, which predates xint and is not as optimized.

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Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to compile a LaTeX document

[Tex/LaTex] How to prolong compilation time while engaging in leisure activities

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