Has Quarto 1.4 become slower than 1.3 with rendering PDF books with flextables?

[liyongg]

Description

Our team at work has transitioned from Word to a Quarto book project using R to ultimately publish our annual report as PDF. This was done around December 2023 and January 2024, in which we used Quarto 1.3. The book project consists of 8 .qmd files and has a pre- and post-render script to mutate some things in the output .tex file, which then is rendered with tinytex::xelatex() in the post-render script. The report has a lot of ggplot and flextable objects.

Now I am preparing for next year/round and I am checking for compatibility issues with rendering the book project using Quarto 1.4, as I am not sure if Quarto 1.5 will already be available by then. I am using qvm to install multiple versions of Quarto on my Windows client. There seem to be differences in render time for both versions. Excuse me for not having the time yet to bring a reprex. I hope that some pointers could help me resolve the problem, and will try to make time for a reprex if absolutely necessary. Last time I tried, the flextables I created did not cause these huge differences. For what it's worth, I have rendered the Quarto project in two independent environments: on a VM provided by work, but also on a separate device (used by the team for work) and experienced/observed similar differences in render time between Quarto versions.

OS and quarto check output

Windows 10 x64

$ quarto1.3 check

[>] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.1.1: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.55.0: OK
[>] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[>] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.3.450
      Path: C:\Users\x\AppData\Local\qvm\versions\v1.3.450\bin
      CodePage: 1252

[>] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[>] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.9.5
      Path: C:/Users/x/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python.exe
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with py -m pip install jupyter

(/) Checking R installation...........✔ .Rprofile: Rdata file ingelezen:  data/RR2024_20240117_131326.Rdata
[>] Checking R installation...........(None)

      Unable to locate an installed version of R.
      Install R from https://cloud.r-project.org/

$ quarto check
Quarto 1.4.554
[>] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.1.11: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.69.5: OK
      Deno version 1.37.2: OK
[>] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[>] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.4.554
      Path: C:\Users\x\AppData\Local\qvm\versions\v1.4.554\bin
      CodePage: 1252

[>] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: v2024.04
      Chromium: (not installed)

[>] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: TinyTex
      Path: C:\Users\x\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\
      Version: 2024

[>] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[>] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.9.5
      Path: C:/Users/x/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python39/python.exe
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with py -m pip install jupyter

(/) Checking R installation...........✔ .Rprofile: Rdata file ingelezen:  data/RR2024_20240117_131326.Rdata
[>] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.2.3
      Path: C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-42~1.3
      LibPaths:
        - C:/Tools/proj/renv/library/R-4.2/x86_64-w64-mingw32
        - C:/Users/x/AppData/Local/R/cache/R/renv/sandbox/R-4.2/x86_64-w64-mingw32/19d6eec0
      knitr: 1.45
      rmarkdown: 2.25

[>] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

Only text and inline R code

I have tried quite some debugging and noticed that v1.3 has approximately the same render times as v1.4 when excluding .qmd files that have use quite a lot of flextable and ggplot objects. But it does contain some R code chunks and also uses the inline variable syntax, r variable_defined_in_chunk

$ time quarto1.3 render
...
real    1m22,317s
user    0m0,031s
sys     0m0,046s

$ time quarto render
real    1m22,825s
user    0m0,015s
sys     0m0,046s

This is reasonable!

Including one additional .qmd file with many flextable and ggplot objects

$ time quarto1.3 render
...
real    2m20,554s
user    0m0,015s
sys     0m0,061s

$ time quarto render
...
real    15m14,170s
user    0m0,015s
sys     0m0,062s

Not sure if this is any helpful, but I noticed it takes a lot longer before the post-render script starts. In Quarto 1.4 it seems to hang at:

pandoc
...
  date: 12 januari 2024

Including one additional .qmd file with only three flextable objects and no ggplot objects

$ time quarto1.3 render
...
real    1m43,202s
user    0m0,000s
sys     0m0,031s

$ time quarto render
...
real    6m54,161s
user    0m0,062s
sys     0m0,015s

Yet again, it hangs before the post-render script starts.

---

Any ideas as to what could cause this difference? The problem seems to be somehow linked to flextable and I recall that rendering a PDF book with flextables worked again from Quarto 1.4.551 onwards thanks to #8843, but I can't really grasp how the interaction changes despite having the same version of flextable. I am using flextable==0.9.5.

Thank you in advance!

[mcanouil]

Closing this as outdated!

• Performance: Quarto 1.4 renders PDF with flextable considerably slower than Quarto 1.3 #9729