Tested with a CVS snapshot of the fontconfig 2.4 branch from yesterday. I noticed that if the global fonts.cache-2 files are out of date, applications using fontconfig take a long time to start. I understand that this happens once because the user cache file ~/.fonts.cache-2 has to be generated. But if this file has been generated, subsequently called applications should start fast. With the current fontconfig, the slowness doesn't go away. To reduce the problem to a simple test case, I deleted all global fonts.cache-2 files and then tried the following: mfabian@magellan:~$ time fc-list "Luxi Sans" ; ls -l --time-style=full-iso .fonts.cache-2 Luxi Sans:style=Bold Luxi Sans:style=Regular Luxi Sans:style=Oblique Luxi Sans:style=Bold Oblique real 2m18.368s user 0m52.559s sys 0m2.780s -rw------- 1 mfabian suse 4515026 2005-10-20 18:23:33.000000000 +0200 .fonts.cache-2 mfabian@magellan:~$ time fc-list "Luxi Sans" ; ls -l --time-style=full-iso .fonts.cache-2 Luxi Sans:style=Bold Luxi Sans:style=Regular Luxi Sans:style=Oblique Luxi Sans:style=Bold Oblique real 0m5.154s user 0m1.200s sys 0m0.208s -rw------- 1 mfabian suse 45890 2005-10-20 18:25:00.000000000 +0200 .fonts.cache-2 mfabian@magellan:~$ time fc-list "Luxi Sans" ; ls -l --time-style=full-iso .fonts.cache-2 Luxi Sans:style=Bold Luxi Sans:style=Regular Luxi Sans:style=Oblique Luxi Sans:style=Bold Oblique real 2m13.954s user 0m53.459s sys 0m3.244s -rw------- 1 mfabian suse 4515026 2005-10-20 18:27:38.000000000 +0200 .fonts.cache-2 mfabian@magellan:~$ time fc-list "Luxi Sans" ; ls -l --time-style=full-iso .fonts.cache-2 Luxi Sans:style=Bold Luxi Sans:style=Regular Luxi Sans:style=Oblique Luxi Sans:style=Bold Oblique real 0m4.074s user 0m1.220s sys 0m0.196s -rw------- 1 mfabian suse 45890 2005-10-20 18:28:30.000000000 +0200 .fonts.cache-2 mfabian@magellan:~$ You see that the first invocation of "fc-list" is slow and generates a 4.5 MB ~/.fonts.cache-2 file. The next invocation of "fc-list" is fast but surprisingly changes the ~/.fonts.cache-2 again and reduces it to a size of only 45 KB. This cannot be correct. The next invocation of "fc-list" is slow again and regenerates the 4.5 MB ~/.fonts.cache-2 file again. I.e. every second invocation of "fc-list" is fast but apparently destroys the ~/.fonts.cache-2 file. -- Mike FABIAN <mfabian@xxxxxxx> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian ?????????????
