Arch Linux

topcat01

Member

Registered: 2019-09-17

Posts: 309

man/troff slowdown

After updating my system, I started noticing delays before a man page appears. The delay seems to be proportional (using `time`) to the length if the rendered page. ffmpeg-all is particularly bad. I think I have narrowed it down to groff/troff version 1.24. I compared it to Debian 13 and Ubuntu LTS using groff 1.23 and ffmpeg-all is instant there. In order to eliminate man/terminal/pager, etc., I tested using the following command:

time zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ffmpeg-all.1.gz|troff -mtty-char -mandoc -rLL=155n -rLT=155n -Tutf8>/dev/null

and this is about 2-2.5x slower on Arch compared to Debian on comparable hardware. I posted on the IRC where this was confirmed by multiple users. It's looking like a regression in groff.

dimich

Member

From: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-11-03

Posts: 719

Re: man/troff slowdown

The same as https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=312537 ?
It's planned to fix in 1.25.0: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68145

topcat01

Member

Registered: 2019-09-17

Posts: 309

Re: man/troff slowdown

Great! Thank you for your post and the link!