Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista

[Trevor Daniels]

Jonathan

The slowness is certainly not inherently due to Vista
as LilyPond has always run fine under Vista here.  The
slowness issue was discussed at some length back in
March 08 on both -user and -bug when it was determined
that it was due to font building.  This is almost certainly
is cause of the recently reported slowness.  Incidentally,
a similar issue made LilyPond slow under XP too, and this
was fixed with the 2.11.43 release.

I don't understand the technical issues, but on Vista
the fonts are contained in ~\.lilypond-fonts.cache-2.
(To see these make sure you have the options set in
Windows Explorer to Show hidden file and folders.)
This should contain a number of smaller files (>=2)
and one large file, c. 800Kb on my system.  Check the
date/time the large file was last modified.  It should
only be changed infrequently (I don't know what triggers
it.)  If it changes on every LP run, then this is the cause
of the slowness.  Two of the smaller files should be rebuilt
on the first run after a new install, which causes the
this first run to take more time, around 20 secs more,
than subsequent runs.

So what might cause this incorrect font cache rebuild?

In the past, one cause was an incorrect version of
libfontconfig-1.dll but this is unlikely now as the
appropriate version of this dll is included with
every binary.  Another possibility is that when this dll
searches for the font cache it checks for an old cache
first.  The fonts used to be cached in ~\.fontconfig.
If such a directory is present it might be worth trying
deleting it or moving it to another directory.

Trevor



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Kulp" <address@hidden>
To: "Tim Slattery" <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista


> Tim Slattery wrote:
> > Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > > 545 Defect Verified Medium ---- v.villenave    LilyPond is excessively 
> > > > slow on Windows Vista   Performance fixed_2_11_43
> > > Rob,
> > >
> > > Have you checked that it's slow the _second_ time you run a file?  It 
> > > will be slow the first time it runs because it needs to build a font 
> > > cache, but successive times should not be slow.
> >
> > On my Vista system, when I invoke Lilypond I get the GNU version
> > notice, and then.....
> >
> > it sits for almost 50 seconds, apparently doing NOTHING. Then it wakes
> > up and processes the file. It's still usable, but it sure slows things
> > down.
>
> For the sake of testing, I booted into my Vista Home Premium partition and 
> installed the latest Lilypond binary from the download page.  I ran a 
> lilypond file once and it took about 90 seconds, then ran it a second time 
> and it took more than 60 seconds.  The same file on Linux compiles in less 
> than 2 seconds.  Honestly I don't know how anyone uses Vista as their main 
> OS.  This is a reasonably powerful laptop less than 6 months old with 2GB 
> of RAM and a dual-core processor.  I have all the aero eye candy disabled 
> and it still runs 10x slower than the 8-year-old Gateway box in my office 
> running Ubuntu 8.04.  Man.  Glad to be back on the Linux side :)
>
> Jon
> --
> Jonathan Kulp
> http://www.jonathankulp.com
>
>
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