MiKTeX and proTeXt ⇒ very slow compilation

[lbrannma]

Hi All.. I am running MiKTeX 2.8 (complete installation on a local drive) on a Windows 7 machine. The following code, run from my local drive, takes one minute ten seconds to compile on my machine and less than a second to compile on a colleague's identical machine. It also takes a long time to compile when I use a pre-compiled header. The problem appears to be loading the styles and their dependencies, the .sty lines on the command window when compiling appear quite slowly. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

The following code takes about 1:10 to execute on my machine (one minute, ten seconds). It takes a split second on a colleague's machine (she has the same machine as me - same RAM, etc). It also takes a long time with a pre-compiled header. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,titlepage,dvips]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx, lscape, dcolumn, longtable, caption, parskip, amsmath, enumitem}
\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}
\raggedright
\begin{document}
Start of document
\section{Analysis Objectives}
{\it          
\begin{itemize}
\item State the objectives 
\end{itemize}
}
\subsection{Study Design}
This is the first sub-section.
\end{document}

[lbrannma]

Problem solved. My MiKTeX 2.8 installation was a complete installation. I removed it from my PC running Windows 7 via brute force: I deleted the folder and all references to MiKTeX from the registry. It took a long time to clear the registry since it contained a huge number of .sty files and I did not have a registry cleaner handy. My suspicion (no way to verify) is that the slow compilation was caused by needing to find/search for the packages in my source code among the huge number in the registry. After cleaning my machine, I installed the basic version of MiKTeX 2.9, under which my source code compiles in a split second.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi lbrannma,

welcome to the forum!

Very nice to read that you were able to solve that problem.

Btw. instead of

Code: Select all

\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}

I would use the parskip package:

Code: Select all

\usepackage{parskip}

Stefan