Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista

[Trevor Daniels]

Jonathan Kulp wrote Friday, November 14, 2008 7:49 PM


> Francisco Vila wrote:
> > 2008/11/14 Jonathan Kulp <address@hidden>:
> > > I have only upgraded a couple of times, and it was in response to this
> > > thread, just to test it out.  It's possible that I upgraded one more 
> > > time
> > > before that.  I always use the Add/Remove program tool built into 
> > > Windows,
> > > accessed by the Control Panel.  On Linux I always run the uninstall 
> > > script
> > > that comes with Lilypond, but I don't know how to do this on Windows. 
> > > Like
> > > I said, I don't use Windows regularly  (...poking in the Windows 
> > > partition
> > > now...) Aha!  I just noticed the uninstall.exe file in the Lilypond
> > > directory!  Should I try running that and then doing a fresh reinstall 
> > > of
> > > Lilypond?  Does the Windows Add/Remove GUI use this uninstall.exe file 
> > > or
> > > does it use something else?  I can try this after lunch if you think 
> > > it's a
> > > good idea.
> >
> > The standar way of uninstalling lilypond on windows is to launch the
> > Uninstall program found into the lilypond  entry of the Start button->
> > programs menu.
> >
> > I think the Windows builtin Control Panel -> uninstall feature should
> > use this program.
>
> Alright, I uninstalled by going through the program menu and choosing the 
> uninstall script.  The process looked exactly the same as when I did it 
> from the Control Panel.  (Either way it's incredibly slow.  Why is it so 
> much slower on Windows than on Linux?)

I don't know what Linux uninstall does, but on Windows it
systematically deletes every file in the install directories
one by one and then deletes every directory that is empty.
I always assumed that this is so any files added by the user
are left untouched.  Then when an upgraded version is installed
it uses the same directory structure and so inherits those
locally added files.

Since I have no locally added files I don't use the uninstall
procedure - I simply delete the entire LilyPond directories.
This is certainly quicker!

> After uninstalling I found, though, that the Lilypond directory was still 
> there in the Program Files directory, and from that I could tell the date 
> on which I first installed LP on this laptop, 12 June 2008.  I deleted the 
> LP directory from Program Files, hoping that a *really* fresh install 
> would fix the problem of the fontconfig cache rebuilding all the time.  It 
> didn't help.  I reinstalled Lilypond (2.11.63-1) and ran my test file 
> again, twice, and the cache was rebuilt on the second run just like the 
> first.  Anything else I should try or information I could provide to help 
> track down the problem?

Yes.  Could you check the creation date of the large cache file,
and if that date is within your daylight saving period try
deleting the entire lilypond font cache, ie delete the
.lilypond-fonts.cache-2 directory so the font cache is rebuilt
from scratch.  Maybe a long shot but worth a try.  See my other
recent note for details of why.

Trevor