I'd like to weigh in on this one.
My experience is totally contrary to the way this discussion has gone.
The actual entry and correction of the music is a trivial small part of
the time I spend working with Lilypond. I spend much more time in
adjusting the tweaks, especially the choice of line breaks, page breaks
and the locations of rehearsal marks. This activity has much more
requirement to actually render the whole document. And it takes forever
on my 700Mhz PII! So, cutting out processing of sections of music is of
little use. I'm really looking for faster rendering in general.
BTW, some watching of the process leads me to think that one of the
biggest performance sinks is conversion to PDF. I think that
performance may be a non-linear function of the number of pages. The
final phase of rendering a 28 page conductor's score takes hours. This
is much more than twice as long as other scores that are approximately
half the length. It is also much, much longer than it takes to get to
the prompt about starting the PDF conversion.
FWIW, this could be caused by or at least exacerbated by poor memory
usage in the conversion phase. If the PS to PDF conversion loads the
whole document into memory at once, this could all be the result of swap
thrashing.
The above is all in 2.6.4-1. I haven't gone to 2.7 yet, though some of
the new features look tempting.
Dick
On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 13:31 -0800, Ben Fisher wrote:
Thanks for the suggestions.
Skipping corrected music looks like the most helpful option. It is a
cool and useful idea to skip music. (altough the way to do seems a
little awkward.)
-Ben