Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista

[Mats Bengtsson]

Perhaps it's worth investigating if it's a problem that has come back in 
the most recent
development versions or if the solution in version 2.11.43-2 only helped 
for some users.

Could any of you seeing this problem try to install version 2.11.43-2 from
http://download.linuxaudio.org/lilypond/binaries/mingw/lilypond-2.11.43-2.mingw.exe
and see if it has the same problems. It's probably a good idea to remove 
all files related
to the font cache first, so they don't interfere with the result.

Also, could you confirm if you run with full administrator privileges or 
as an ordinary user?

   /Mats

Jonathan Kulp wrote:
> Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Trevor Daniels 
> > <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > Trevor is correct.  Every instance of lilypond slowness was caused by
> > fontconfig caches.  The problem is that there are a bazillion of
> > windows versions; I'm not talking about XP vs. Vista but rather
> > distinctions in minor version numbers, and perhaps changes that vendor
> > do on top of that.  For some versions, the fontconfig cache ends up
> > not getting written (permission problems?) or getting recreated all
> > the time.
> >
> > Once LilyPond has the font caches computed correctly, running times
> > should differ little between windows, linux and mac.
> >
> > The problem is that the problem is often hard to diagnose and
> > reproduce without having the afflicted machine at hand.  In general,
> > my takeaway from it is that shipping software on top of Windows is a
> > religious experience. You can never be sure that it works, so you have
> > to pray a lot.
>
> Ok I just booted back into Vista and checked the fontconfig cache's 
> time and date stamp, then ran my test lilypond file.  The fontconfig 
> cache was rebuilt.  The date/time stamp changed to today's date and 
> time.  I ran the file again, the cache was rebuilt again.  First time 
> took about 90 seconds, second time 70 seconds.  On my son's laptop (a 
> Dell that's about 4 years old) there's a partition with XP and it ran 
> the test file in about 10 seconds, which is still slower than the 2-3 
> seconds it takes under Ubuntu Linux on the same laptop.
>
> So, is there a way to tell the machine where the fontconfig cache file 
> is so that it doesn't create a new one every time?  I'll be glad to 
> keep testing this but only about once a day.  It's too painful to be 
> in Vista for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  In three 
> minutes I got five warnings about my system and it wasn't even 
> connected to the internet...
>
> Jon

--
=============================================
        Mats Bengtsson
        Signal Processing
        School of Electrical Engineering
        Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
        SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
        Sweden
        Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463                         
       Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
        Email: address@hidden
        WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
=============================================