TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ Speed Issue with custom "TEXMFLOCAL"

[ihowarth]

Having recently upgraded my linux install from Mageia2 to Mageia3 (including TeXLive), I found that pdflatex had slowed to an intolerable degree. I have traced this empirically to my use of custom class files, which are located in
/mydir/myTeX/tex

I had previously defined a custom
TEXMFLOCAL = /mydir/myTeX
in my texmf.cnf (followed by "texhash"). If I replace this with the standard
TEXMFLOCAL = /usr/share/texmf-local
(which, incidentally, is empty) everything becomes super zippy again. This loses me my local class files, so I now put a soft link in for TEXMFHOME:

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cd /home/user/texmf ; ln -s /mydir/myTeX/tex

and run texhash again.

This puts the class files in my LaTeX path, *and* gives me fast response, which proves (I think) that there's nothing obviously funny about /mydir/myTeX/tex or its contents.

So, all is well - except that I have no idea why changing TEXMFLOCAL, which has served me well for many years, is now broke.

Note. incidentally, that the pdflatex issue is reflected by (and may be linked to) kpsewhich behaviour - in the "slow" configuration of a custom TEXMFLOCAL, commands such as

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kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME

are also excrutiatingly slow.

Any ideas? Bug, feature, or (most probably) user error?

[vsnyder]

I have a similar problem that might or might not be related.

When I launch xdvi, it uses kpathsea to check seventeen fonts, and discovers they already exist.

xdvi used to be blindingly fast to load or switch between documents. Now it takes over a minute. What's happened to it?