Is pagination quadratic?

[Victor Eijkhout]

The other day I had the brilliant idea of writing some python code to generate 
the lilypond input for exercises. After all, generating the lilypond code for 
all triads, all scales, whatnot, is pretty simple.

So now I have this exercise study that generates close to 2000 scales like 
"\relative c { a b c d e f g a g f e d c b a}". And "finding the ideal number 
of pages" takes an ungodly amount of time. Minutes. Probably over 10.

Which makes me wonder if pagination is quadratic (I really hope it's not 
exponential!) and if so, if it should be.

Any thoughts?

Victor.