Today I found that compiling LaTeX source is insanely slow(took me several minutes to compile a simple file). After a lot of trial and error, I found the reason.

The problem description#

I was trying to compile a tex file on my Windows 8.1 machine and observed that the compilation speed was insanely slow. I created a test file with only a few Chinese character and compiled it. The compilation time is around 1.15 minutes. At first, I thought it was probably due to the Chinese character. So I replaced the Chinese character with simple English words. After that, I recompiled the file, but found no noticeable speedup in compilation time. The follwing is my testing code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xeCJK}
\begin{document}
测试 % change the Chinese character to English does not make a difference
\end{document}

If I comment out \usepackage{xeCJK}, the compilation process also sped up.

The solution#

After some search on the Internet, I found a relevant post on the Stack Exchange. It turned out that it was caused by a new install of font. After a font is installed or removed, we should manually run fc-cache -f from command line to rebuild the TeX Live font cache. After this rebuilding process, compiling files with xelatex should be normal again.

References#

• Discussion of this on the TeX Live mailing list