Just to make sure we are on the same page, which fontconfig version are you testing with?
On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 3:21 AM, Kurt Kartaltepe <kkartaltepe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For clarification, I have tested with ONLY the ttf fonts on my system.
In this case the normal 18s cache build step takes 15s. This suggests
to me there is no significant difference between FON and TTF, as they
made up ~21% of my fonts and removing them resulted in a proportionate
savings. Sorry If my OP was misleadingly suggesting that FON files
were exceptionally slow, I only meant that they may not have received
the same improvement as TTF files which may just be my
misunderstanding of the changes you made and lack of testing.
I am concerned with why it seems acceptable to rebuild the entire
cache when only a tiny portion of it has actually changed. Users for
which rebuilding the cache is a significant event are those with large
font libraries. These users are are by their very nature more likely
to add or remove fonts from their library. It seems that this is the
worst possible case for the current caching strategy, and *this* seems
like an issue worth fixing.
In this case if checksuming files is slower than scanning them the
issue still stands. Why checksum files that haven't changed? Does
fontconfig not trust filesystem metadata? It would appear directory
change times are used in detecting when to rescan so why can this not
be extended to files instead of the expensive checksum?
FWIW an md5sum of my entire font library takes ~1s with hot caches
which I still find unacceptable as my library is possibly
significantly smaller and my system significantly more powerful than a
potential user's.
--Kurt Kartaltepe
On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 9:10 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What's with fon files being slow? Please report *that* and let's fix it.
>
> We've made scanning, like, 100x faster already. 2007 stats are irrelevant.
> Checksuming files is slower than scanning them now.
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 8:08 AM, Kurt Kartaltepe <kkartaltepe@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> While trying to move a project to the pango stack I noticed the native
>> font selection backends were bad/useless on some platforms (like
>> windows see [1]). So I opted to try and use fontconfig on all
>> platforms as it performs outstandingly and has wonderful defaults for
>> all platforms.
>>
>> However during this transition I noticed that there are some major
>> issues with cache build speed and during investigation I see that
>> there has recently been effort to improve the situation[2]. From what
>> I can tell the fontconfig team has maintained that these cache issues
>> were irrelevent for the primary fontconfig platform (linux) [3]. On
>> linux of course the cache is global and maintained usually by font
>> packages ensuring its up-to-date. However it was precisely this the
>> slow cache build times that lead to package managers being required to
>> build in additional tooling to support not rebuilding cache for every
>> font installed [4].
>>
>> Anyway I hope that is enough reason to persuade you that there are
>> substantial improvements to make to the caching strategy and they are
>> beneficial not only for the odd platforms (osx, windows) but also for
>> Linux.
>>
>> My question is if fontconfig would be receptive to building/accepting
>> a patch modifying the caching strategy to include checkums per file
>> instead of/in addition to per directory. Currently any change to
>> directory (such as adding a new font) invalidates all fonts within
>> that directory. This means for directories like the system directory
>> it results in re scans of hundreds or more fonts. Thankfully this is
>> faster on platforms like linux where all fonts on freetype. However
>> this improvement in scanning did not carry over to windows with its
>> many FNT (150 on the average install) and even on my very robust
>> development machine building a cache for a mere 650 files takes half a
>> minute. This might be acceptable on install of the application where
>> we can take our time building the cache, but what happens when a user
>> installs 1 more font? A change to cache individual file checksums
>> would provide fontconfig a way to only require the expensive coverage
>> check of a single font instead of the entirety of a users. I dare say
>> with this exact change the need to use a faster less robust coverage
>> check that made scanning freetype fonts faster may be unneeded as the
>> number of scans required to rebuild a cache would reduced 100x on the
>> average system or more.
>>
>> I'm certain such a change would be highly appreciated by all
>> fontconfig consumers who are hoping to use its powerful feature set in
>> a multiplatform context.
>>
>> --Kurt Kartaltepe
>>
>> [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162681
>> [2]
>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2017- August/005986.html
>> [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64766
>> [4]
>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2007- October/002728.html
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>
>
>
>
> --
> behdad
> http://behdad.org/
--
behdad
http://behdad.org/
http://behdad.org/
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