What version of makeinfo do we include with the windows crossbuilds now?  I also see no noticeable delay on windows or ubuntu vm. Its been long enough without any activity to change the doc system, I'm going to close this as a won't fix.  Easy enough to reopen or generate a new report if there's interest later.

I'm the one from the original report:
My timing was done on my home PC, which is an Intel Atom from 2010, which from experience I know to be easily a factor of 5 slower than my i5 at work. Sadly/fortunately, at work I have makeinfo 4.13, which formats the help text in 0.008 s.

Yes, already when I wrote the bug report, I compared the 30 minutes invested by me to possible savings. And I think 10 hours to be a rather optimistic estimate. And yes, I know that this would have to also track when user-written functions are modified to reformat the help text the first time it is requested, but the harder part of such a mechanism seems to be already in place (ignore_function_time_stamp...).

But to me it seems that historically the largest part of free software coding stemmed from personal irritations, and if J. Random Hacker each time would have drawn up a business plan whether it is worth to set out implementing anything, the tens of thousands of programs nobody but himself ever used would not have been written (no problem there), but also not the hundreds that enable us today to use a computer as a tool that feels like an extension of the fingertips. So all that I intended with my post was (first) to document a dirty solution to anyone that stumbles over the problem and does a quick search, and (second) that perhaps somebody indeed thinks "Ah, now that I read it, this is what has been irritating me all along!", and starts to work on a better solution.

So yes, this is only wishlist, and if I got the help text in 0.2 s, I probably would not have noticed the lag, let alone reported a bug. But seen from the other side, I think that the texinfo people only reimplemented makeinfo in perl, thereby sacrificing speed, because they assumed that the output gets cached in the info files.

Rik - are you using makeinfo 6.x? I also see times of about 150-200 ms on my system with makeinfo 6.3. I do have 4.13 hanging around for comparison, but I don't have a working copy of 5.x to compare against to see how much slower it was. Anecdotally I remember 6.x as being noticeably faster than 5.x when the new release appeared, FWIW.

I also don't think it's worth the developer time personally, but someone may feel inclined to work on something like this. Could be transplanted to the Projects wiki page.

Please test with makeinfo 6.3 if you are able to. Some notable changes between 5.0 and 6.3 include "Some Perl modules have been rewritten in C to increase speed" and "a bit faster".

That said, yes makeinfo is still perl and it is still noticeably slower than makeinfo 4.13. You are free to use 4.13 on your end, as you have done. Octave won't bundle GNU texinfo with its own distribution, but users and distributors are free to do so if they want.

Something could be done with the doc cache. Such an approach would also have to take into account user .m function files on the load path, which may change or may not exist at any moment.

Another option would be to pursue another doc markup language and processor, but this probably won't be done since Texinfo is the GNU project recommended documentation format, and the same function doc strings are used both for online help as well as for the full manual.

I'll leave this bug open as a wishlist improvement if someone wants to pursue some optimization on how doc strings are loaded and stored in memory.