If someone has same setup as me, this might be of interest to them.
tex4ht is really slow on large files. I could never find why.
I use windows 10 as base desktop but do everything on Linux. I've
been using Virtualbox all the time.
Now I tried WSL 2.0 on windows. This is Microsoft Linux subsystem.
Installed Latest Ubuntu on it and latest texLive and did
some performance comparison to see if tex4ht will be faster on
WSL or not compared to VBox.
I picked a small latex file to compile (only 500 pdf pages). VBox
has 30 GB of ram and assigned 8 cores. WSL is similar.
Compiling to HMTL only on VBox gives
real 8m52.232s
user 4m18.212s
sys 0m42.791s
On WSL, same command gives
real 6m12.639s
user 3m38.296s
sys 0m7.305s
So on WSL tex4ht is about 30% faster looking at real time.
Btw, compiling using lualatex, the same file, here are the numbers.
on WSL 2.0
real 1m15.851s
user 0m11.553s
sys 0m2.668s
on VBox
real 1m49.199s
user 0m28.625s
sys 0m19.688s
So we see that tex4ht is about 6 times slower than lualatex on this
example.
So I am switching to WSL now for everything.
One day, I will get dedicated PC with Linux on it and see if
performance of text4ht will be better or not.
ps. the tex4ht command used is
make4ht --shell-escape -ulm default -a warning
-f html5+join_colors -c nma_mathjax.cfg
-e
/mnt/g/public_html/styles/texmf/tex/latex/tex4ht_build_files/MAIN.mk4 index.tex
'mathjax,htm,5,fn-in,notoc*,p-width,charset=utf-8,cut-fullname,nostyle'
'-cunihtf -utf8'
--Nasser
