Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista

[Trevor Daniels]

Jonathan Kulp wrote Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:30 PM
> 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.

OK, Jonathan, thanks.  Let's see if we together can get a bit further with
solving this problem since we have very similar systems - mine works,
yours doesn't - so all we have to do is find what is different.  I'd bet it 
is
something to do with the different history of LP installs on the two 
systems.

First, a couple of questions:

1) Do you remember the version number of the earliest LilyPond you
installed on this system?  In particular, was it earlier than 2.11.43,
released around March 08?

2) When you upgrade do you use the uninstall utility that comes with
LilyPond to remove the old version, or some other method?

Trevor