Speed improvements for troff? HELP! - (nf)

[rich at cfib.UUCP]

#N:cfib:11100006:000:1423
cfib!rich    Jan 25 11:49:00 1984

We have an HP-9000 Series 500 running System III UNIX.  This machine has
2.5Mb memory and 2 cpus in it.  We are a company that runs
    tbl | troff -ms | <postprocessor>
pipes for up to 12 hours every night (sometimes during the day) for our Xerox
8700 laser printer, producing 50 or 60 40-page documents a day.  Each document
currently takes 8 to 10 minutes in the format pipe.  Obviously, it would be of
great value to us if we could improve the performance of troff.  We tried
compiling it (troff) with the in-memory compile flag set, but this caused our
machine to page fault like crazy and made troff run 70% SLOWER.  Our working
set ratio allows the machine to expand memory fully until there is no more
available; since the test ran on an otherwise empty machine, it is hard to
believe it ran out of memory.  We have contacted HP technical support in
Ft. Collins and are waiting for a response.  I would guess this is an HP
problem.

Has anyone had any success with the in-memory compile flag?  If so, what was the
performance improvement?  Does anyone have any suggestions for us?  Does anyone
know of any versions of troff that have been modified or rewritten to improve
performance?  (You mean someone that actually looked at and (gasp) MODIFIED
troff code?)

Thanks in advance.

Rich Baughman
The Consumer Financial Institute (a.k.a. C.M. Leinwand Associates)
Newton, MA
617-969-9460
...decvax!cca!ima!cfib!rich