Hi,

In 2005 I put together a 64-staff score running 250 measures of music (for
untuned percussion). The LilyPond version was 2.7.x and the compile time was
15 or 20 minutes on an Intel iMac running OS 10.4.something with 1.5 GB ram
and a 1.83 Ghz processor. Not super fast, but certainly acceptable; the
score compiled and I've been distributing the resulting PDFs for years.

Going back to that exact score *on the same machine* now hangs at
"Preprocessing graphical objects ...". I've let the process run to more than
an hour on two separate occasions with no end in sight. I'm writing now to
ask if there's a way to speed things up. But because the question has been
asked before, I'll first collect what I think are the important parts from
the archive and then add comments towards the end.

In the thread here from last summer ...

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2009-07/msg00665.html

... Michael Käppler asked this same question and Mark Polesky suggested
turning off point-and-click and also pointed to keep-inside-line. I am
indeed compiling with point-and-click *turned off*. However, when I click
over to ...


http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond-learning/Avoiding-tweaks-with-slower-processing

... the language in the LM is somewhat ambiguous as to whether
keep-inside-line settings speed things up or slow things down.

QUESTION: I have to assume that keep-inside-line is relatively expensive and
that the recommendation in the LM is to *NOT* use the keep-inside-line
settings, yes?

Next, there is a thread here ...

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2009-08/msg00057.html

... but I found no concrete suggestions in this thread similar to Mark's
suggestions in the previous thread.

* * *

I guess the reason I'm writing in to ask the question is that I feel that
something has changed for the worse since the early versions of Lily I used
on the score in 2005. The score most definitely did compile back then. But
now the process won't finish. And this is on precisely the same machine.
Memory and processor have stayed constant; only incremental updates for OS
10.4.x have been applied in the interim.

As a potential clue, top shows Lily consuming most all of the CPU:

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE

    < 12 or 15 entries omitted >

  228 lilypond    98.7% 66:17.88   1    20   217   606M+ 8.69M   612M   650M


(The even amount of 650M virtual memory that the OS is giving to Lily makes
me think that perhaps that number could or should be increased to a gig or
even more, given that the system has a gig and a half installed, mostly
sitting idle. But a few minutes of Googling around suggests to me that user
allocation of virtual memory either isn't possible or isn't documented under
OS X; perhaps I'm wrong here?)

Regardless, I feel like the answer here isn't either more physical memory or
more virtual memory, due to successful compilation on the same machine in
2005.

(As a postscript, I also have #(define page-breaking ly:minimal-breaking)
set in the score because I set all breaks and vertical spacing by hand. I
know that certain changes that Joe's made to dramatically improve vertical
spacing cane be time consumptive in some cases, so maybe this is a
precaution to ward against that. However, the setting produces no obvious
increase in performance, which makes me think that vertical spacing has
nothing to do with the performance difference I'm experiencing.)

Anyone have any last suggestions for places to look or things to check?


Trevor.


-- 
Trevor Bača
trevorb...@gmail.com
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