Hans Aberg <[log in to unmask]> writes: > I do not know if folks are doing profiling on TeX/LaTeX, but an easy way > would be to set \tracingcommands = 1, and then count the frequency in the > log file of the different commands executed. Did you mean \tracingmacros? In a high-level format macro expansions take up more than half of the processing. One would normally want \tracingmacros=2 \tracingcommands=2 It is perhaps of interest to note that unless the tex.pool file is changed, \tex_global:D will be reported in the log file as "{\global}", \scan_stop: will be reported as "{\relax}", and so on. Perhaps e-TeX can provide something useful here for making name changes in some way easier than retangling tex.web. (You can just edit the .pool file, of course---I have done it myself in the past---but then you have to go to some nontrivial extra trouble if you want to synchronize the checksums.)