TeX-related things are very slow when I have lots of files

[Joe Neeman]

Hi all,

I've been struggling with a problem for several days now -- I'm unable to run 
configure without first deleting all my out-www directories and I can't 
finish "make web". Configure seems to hang forever on "checking for working 
metafont mode..." and make web hangs on bibtex.

So I did some experiments. With a clean lilypond directory:

$ time mf-nowin -progname=mf "\mode:=ljfour; mode_setup; end."
<snip output>
real    0m0.332s
user    0m0.160s
sys     0m0.172s

$ time bibtex /tmp/tmp7MOxiHbib2html # this is a file that was left over from 
my last "make web" run
<snip output>
real    0m0.402s
user    0m0.188s
sys     0m0.208s

Now lets create some files:
$ make -C Documentation/user web
# Ctrl-C after a minute or so
$ time mf-nowin -progname=mf "\mode:=ljfour; mode_setup; end."
real    0m32.998s
user    0m28.638s
sys     0m4.336s

$ time bibtex /tmp/tmp7MOxiHbib2html
real    0m43.843s
user    0m38.138s
sys     0m5.552s

If I do a full "make web" run, I can let either of these commands run for 
hours without terminating. If I remove Documentation/user/out-www then the 
times go back to normal. The problem doesn't seem to be related to the type 
of file in Documentation/user/out-www; I've tried doing things like
$ rm Documentation/user/out-www/*.tex
$ time mf-nowin -progname=mf "\mode:=ljfour; mode_setup; end."
$ rm Documentation/user/out-www/*.png
$ time mf-nowin -progname=mf "\mode:=ljfour; mode_setup; end."
etc.
and it doesn't seem to make a difference in which order I remove the different 
file types.

Any ideas?