\environment publications-style

\startcomponent publications-performance

\startchapter[title=Performance]

The move from external \BIBTEX\ processing to internal processing has the
advantage that we stay within the same run. In the traditional approach we had
roughly the following steps:

\startitemize[packed]
\startitem
    In the first \CONTEXT\ run information is collected and written to file.
\stopitem
\startitem
    fter the first run the \BIBTEX\ program converts that file to another
    one, a so called \type {bbl} file with \TEX\ commands.
\stopitem
\startitem
    Successive runs use that file for typesetting references and producing
    lists of publications that are reffered to.
\stopitem
\stopitemize

In the \MKIV\ approach the bibliographic database is loaded in memory each run
and processing also happens each run. On paper this looks less efficient but as
\LUA\ is quite fast, in practice performance is much better.

Probably most demanding is the treatment of authors as we have to analyze names,
split multiple authors and reassemble firstnames, vons, surnames and juniors.
When we sort by author sorting vectors have to be made which also has a penalty.
However, in practice the user will not notice a performance degradation. We did
some tests with a list of 500.000 authors, sorted them and typeset them as list
(producing some 5400 dense pages in a small font and with small margins). This is
typical one of these cases where using \LUAJITTEX\ saves quite time. On my
machine it took just over 100 seconds to get this done. Unfortunately not all
operating systems performed equally well: 32 bit versions worked fine, but 64 bit
\LINUX\ either crashed (stalled) the machine or ran out of memory rather fast,
while \MACOSX\ and \WINDOWS\ performed fine. In practice you will never run into
this, unless you produce massive amounts of bibliographic entries. \LUAJIT\ has
some benefits but also some drawbacks. In practice you will not run into these
problems.

\stopchapter

\stopcomponent

