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[Yue Wang <yuleopen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Mojca:

Last time I said that 64 bits luatex was slower, Snow Leopard hadn't
been released.
On Mac OS X 10.5.8, I run the same test using the two LuaTeX binaries
compiled on that platform, and conclude that 64 bits luatex is slower.
See: https://lists.launchpad.net/context/msg00168.html

Today, I find the old document that I used at that time and compile it
again. i386 runtime is 6.635, and x86_64 runtime is 3.493. So I think
this is due to Apple's improvement  on their 64 bit support in Snow
Leopard (kernel, library and complier).

And here is a longer document compilation result (many images, math,
and complicated styles):

64bits:
mkiv lua stats : current memory usage      - 136 MB (ctx: 139 MB)
mkiv lua stats : runtime                   - 6.243 seconds, 71
processed pages, 72 shipped pages, 11.533 pages/second
MTXrun | total runtime: 6.294

32bits
mkiv lua stats : current memory usage      - 85 MB (ctx: 87 MB)
mkiv lua stats : runtime                   - 12.132 seconds, 71
processed pages, 72 shipped pages, 5.935 pages/second
MTXrun | total runtime: 12.183


It is also possible I did something wrong at that time. 64bits
compilation is not native in Leopard. gcc produce 32bit binaries by
default. In order to get 64bits binaries on Leopard that time, I added
a few modifications to the build script. Maybe some of the
configurations are wrong. On Snow Leopard, this is not needed since
gcc generates 64bits binaries by default.

To conclude: in Snow Leopard, 64bit binary is faster, but uses 2x memory.

So, we should encourage our users to use 64 bits version on Snow
Leopard, as long as their machines supports that. Since most of the
time, users do not enable 64bits kernel, they will fetch 32bits luatex
by default. We should change that behavior in first-setup.sh.

Yue Wang


On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Mojca Miklavec
<mojca.miklavec.lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I tried to boot into 64-bit kernel and it seems to work OK.
>
> And a short benchmark shows that the same document runs 10.6 seconds
> on average with 32-bit LuaTeX and 5.9 seconds on average with 64-bit
> LuaTeX (I made sure to make at least 5 runs before measuring).
>
> Both tests were performed on 64-bit kernel running with all other
> binaries but LuaTeX being the same.
>
> So that's in contradiction with Yue's observation that 64-bit LuaTeX
> runs slower. (Though it may be biased. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac
> OS X tries to run some kind of "virtualizer" for 32-bit binaries.)
>
> Mojca
>
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