Slow performance following upgrade

[Lev Bishop]

On 3/24/07, Zak Johnson wrote:
> Lev Bishop wrote:
> > With the default fontconfig install, fc-cache tries to put the caches
> > in /var/cache/fontconfig and ~/.fontconfig. Check you can write and
> > create files in those directories.
>
> Thanks for the suggestions.  ~/.fontconfig did not exist;
> /var/cache/fontconfig was owned and writeable by me.  Just to be sure, I
> copied files into that directory successfully.  I rebooted to safe mode
> and ran "rm -rf /var/cache/fontconfig" (successfully, with no errors).
> Still at the command window with nothing else running, I ran "fc-cache
> --really-force --verbose" (sorry for the long lines):
<snip>
> fc-cache had created /var/cache/fontconfig, owned and writeable (0755)
> by me (again verified by copying files into the directory successfully).
> It sure seems like slow XFT is a symptom of some other underlying
> problem; what else can I do to diagnose?

I'm grasping at straws now, but... maybe a postinstall script failed
to run. You could try running font-update.

You should be able to see the names of the cache files that fontconfig
is creating if you do
$ FC_DEBUG=16 fc-cache -r -v

Maybe that will give a clue to the problem. Other FC_DEBUG values are:
MATCH            1    Brief information about font matching
  MATCHV           2    Extensive font matching information
  EDIT             4    Monitor match/test/edit execution
  FONTSET          8    Track loading of font information at startup
  CACHE           16    Watch cache files being written
  CACHEV          32    Extensive cache file writing information
  PARSE           64    (no longer in use)
  SCAN           128    Watch font files being scanned to build caches
  SCANV          256    Verbose font file scanning information
  MEMORY         512    Monitor fontconfig memory usage
  CONFIG        1024    Monitor which config files are loaded
  LANGSET       2048    Dump char sets used to construct lang values
  OBJTYPES      4096    Display message when value typechecks fail


Add the value of the desired debug levels together and assign that (in
base 10) to the FC_DEBUG environment variable before running the
application. Output from these statements is sent to stdout.

Fontconfig will distrust its cache files if the timestamps don't make
proper sense (it uses the timestamps to keep track of whether the
caches are up-to-date). Is there anything fishy there (like somehow
/var/cache has a modification time way in the future)?

Otherwise, you should use setup to download the source package for
fontconfig and build a debug version of fc-cache and try to figure out
where things are going wrong.

Lev

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