Parallel rendering with MiKTeX and XeLaTeX

[jjolidon]

Hello all

I'm looking into generating a bunch of reports in parallel with MiKTeX, and I've found so far that texify behaves pretty well when invoked in parallel, I haven't encountered errors or problems so far.

I've found however that there is an initial lock period of roughly one second (on my CPU), most likely at the beginning of the rendering: the reports are basically all identical (for my tests) but they complete after 10, 11, 12, etc. seconds. Given that my CPU has 8 cores I would have expected the reports to complete approximately in batches of 8, after 10 seconds, then 20, then 30. Instead, I'm noticing that very linear 1-second delay between reports.

I'm wondering if you would be able to tell me what kind of locking mechanism there is, and what purpose it serves. I would also like to know if there is there any way I could circumvent it if it happens to serve a goal I can exclude in my case based on fixed assumptions (e.g. if I know I have all mpm packages installed for the reports).

Thanks a lot in advance for all information you could provide, and thanks also for the great work the community is doing on MiKTeX in general!

Sincerely,
Jérôme Jolidon