PrinceXML 7 is on MacOSX much slower than on comparable Linux box.

Mac: MacBookPro/Snow Leopard, 2.8 GHz

Linux box:
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz


Using the bmj_sample.xml sample from the samples pages:

Converting the doc on MacOSX:

ajung@suxmac2-2:~/tmp time prince bmj_sample.xml

real 0m1.785s
user 0m1.231s
sys 0m0.160s


ajung@blackmoon:/tmp> time prince bmj_sample.xml -o xx.pdf

real 0m0.638s
user 0m0.604s
sys 0m0.032s

So the Mac is roughly 3 times slower...any idea why?

There are several possibilities. A good starting point would be to distinguish between start-up time, and overall throughput. This can be done by timing Prince on a very short (or even empty) document, and then on a very long document, and comparing the times on the two platforms. Some things to be careful of when measuring performance:

- The documents must not refer to any remote images, fonts, or style sheets, otherwise the unpredictable variance in HTTP response times will mess up the timings.

- The first time Prince is run will often be noticeably slower, as the operating system loads the necessary fonts in the background. For this reason it is necessary to run the tests several times, to get accurate timings with a fully populated font cache.