Re: man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1))

Larry McVoy
2023-04-07T15:16:44Z

On Fri, Apr 07, 2023 at 06:06:39PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2023 09:43:19 -0500
> > From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
> > Cc: alx.manpages@gmail.com, dirk@gouders.net, cjwatson@debian.org,
> > linux-man@vger.kernel.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org, groff@gnu.org
> >
> > ...which brings me to the other factor, of which I'm more confident: man
> > page rendering times are much lower than they were in Unix's early days.
> >
> > On my system, all groff man pages but one render in between a tenth and
> > a fortieth of a second. The really huge pages like groff(7),
> > groff_char(7), and groff_diff(7) are toward the upper end of this range,
> > because they are long, at ~20-25 U.S. letter pages when formatted for
> > PostScript or PDF, or have many large tables so the tbl(1) preprocessor
> > produces a lot of output.
> >
> > The outlier is groff_mdoc(7) at just over one-third of a second.
>
> Some people consider 0.1 sec, let alone 0.3 sec, to be long enough to
> be annoying.

True but try and balance that with what they are trying to do, clean
things up. I'm retired so my opinion doesn't count but I think they
are on the right path.