How to increase Performance?

Questions
1

Hello Forum,
as suggested yesterday on Discord I’ll ask my question here. I started using Typst a few weeks ago and I absolutely like this project. But I got some performance issues and maybe I made something the wrong way.

May prject consists of a main file, a chapter I put into another file, a bibliography file with about 130 entries now and a CSL file for the bibliography (origionally the APA style but changed for my needs and about half the size of the APA style file).

My main file is generated via an macro and filled with data from a database. Now (because I still start and I only tested the macro) it constists of 4 pages of 4 and another 4 pages with indices. When I will publish the book later the text itself will be 700-750 pages and 50+ pages of indices.

The chapter in the separate file was typed manually. It has 37 pages of text and 4 pages with the bibliography.

I use the webapp for now but especially when I change the bibliography file or the CSL it takes several seconds before changes are applied ( 5-10 seconds). My guess is that the entries to generate the index, the bibliography or the footnotes are the reason for this slowdown.
I have 82 times a #index, 193 times a reference to a CSL resource for the biliography and 186 Footnotes so far. Links to the CSL or other Footnotes also can appear whithin Footnotes.

I don’t use a lot of special formatting stuff. In the header section I only use the following:

#set heading(numbering: "1.")
#show footnote.entry: it => {
  let gap = 1em
  let nums = counter(footnote).at(it.note.location())
  let number = numbering(it.note.numbering, ..nums)
  let link = link.with(it.note.location())
  grid(columns: (2em, 1fr), link(number), it.note.body)
}

So my question are:

  • What might be the main reason for my performance issues?
  • Might it help to split the files into smaller documents or would it be better to combine both into 1 file?
  • Is the number of indix entries, CSL references or footnotes too high for typst?
  • Should I prevent to make references to CSL entries or other footnotes form within a footnote?
  • What else could I do to enhance the speed?
  • As I work from both my work computer and my computer at home using the webapp is the easiest way to work on the documents. If I switch to a CLI app would it be much faster then and can I also use the source files stored in the web or do I need to save them locally on both computers?
  • I wrote that some people used a “plugin” for editors like VSCode. Would the work there be faster than using the webapp?

Maybe I have a lot of questions but I think that other users might have the same when they start to write their thesis or other scientifical documents and improving the performance would be essential to convince those people using Typst instead of Latex.

Thank you very much in advance for any answer or tipps in this case,
Marco

2

Hi @Marco1 ,

A couple meta points regarding your post:

  1. The title should be in the form of a question (see How to post in the Questions category)
    In this case since you have more than one question maybe focus on the main slowdown you are seeing:

How to improve performance with many CSL references?

or a more generic

How to improve performance?

  1. Posting code is a good idea but it helps immensely with readability to format it using the built-in functionality of the forum. See here. For instance:
```
#let variable = "Hello"
The variable is :#variable
```

renders as:

#let variable = "Hello"
The variable is :#variable

I only have ideas about the last two of your questions:

  • Working on multiple computers with the CLI - Keeping the files up to date on both computers would be necessary. Luckily there are a lot of tools to do just that. Git comes to mind as a particularly robust system that is well suited to Typst’s plain text files, but Drop Box, OneDrive, GDrive, etc would work also.
  • Is Tinymist for VSCode faster? - I suspect it would be but don’t know for sure. Setting up this environment is pretty simple so you could test the actual improvement for your document.
    Note that you don’t need to use VSCode, Tinymist works for a lot of IDEs (and there was a forum post about this too: What are your offline text editor preferences?)
3

Thanks for your reply. I just changed the topic and added the code-format.

The main problem ist that web-access in my company is limited so I can’t install any software without permission of the admins. As this is a more private project it’s hard to get this. Using the webapp enables me to add a thought I get during the day or to add a text snippet I found fast in the next break. But sometimes I also work on the work PC during my coffee break or after work. And then the lagg kicks in…

But thanks a lot for your ideas…

1 Like