Re: lilypond slowdown in CGI web program

[Jim Tisdall]

No one else reported the same problem on mac w/apache
(or anywhere else) -- in brief, a 30 second delay running lilypond
called from web page.

But just to finish up, I did get some expert attention and I tried
several things, and *something* worked, but I'm not sure what was
the change that actually solved the problem.

After including the
original post, I append some of the troubleshooting exchanges,
and, as I say, something did finally work.  (And by the way, I
tried all sorts of things, permissions, apache config files,
ad infinitum in a subjective sense.)

Thanks to Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

On 9/18/13 8:55 PM, Jim Tisdall wrote:
> Hi, I'm going to briefly sketch this problem, just to see if anyone
> else has come across it ... and because being specific would be a
> real bear, given the interacting systems involved ...
>
> When I call lilypond to compile a score by means of a web page
> that is using CGI, lilypond takes about 25 seconds to
> *successfully* complete.  From the commandline,
> same files and flags, under a second; from a similar but non-web
> program, under a second.
>
> Has anyone else encountered this kind of behavior?
>
> I have many similar scripts that call all sorts of programs under
> the same (perl CGI) (apache2) (mac) unix server, no problems.
> Problem appears on all attempted web browsers, so seems to be
> in the lilypond-apache interaction.  My knowledge of python is slim
> and of scheme is rusty; c and perl okay.  Many googles of various
> ideas over several months have not worked.  I have seen some stuff
> about python slowdowns and fixes, but not sure what to do with that.
> I admit I've not dug too deeply into lilypond source code yet, my
> c is okay (I'm a bell labs c programmer in a former incarnation.)
>
> I've tried many different flags ... here's the current set:
> /Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/lilypond
> -dmidi-extension=mid -fps -fpng -dbackend=eps
> -deps-box-padding=3.000000 --output=basename lilyfile
>
> Thanks for listening ;>) -- Jim Tisdall



Jan,

...  In this whodunnit
my pick for the villain is FcFontSetList rescan 30 second timeout as detailed 
following.

Peace,
Jim

In more (and perhaps unwanted) detail:

...

> Assuming that you're right, though, what I can imagine is something
> like fontconfig's setup running each time and failing to write its
> cache.

Ah, I like the sound of that.  I'm not familiar with the system, but
I look and I find
/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
in which are
<!-- Font cache directory list -->

        <cachedir>/usr/var/cache/fontconfig</cachedir>
        <cachedir>~/.fontconfig</cachedir>

and, tantalizingly, at the end of the fonts.conf file I find
<!--
  Rescan configuration every 30 seconds when FcFontSetList is called
 -->
                <rescan>
                        <int>30</int>
                </rescan>
        </config>

</fontconfig>

...

There is no /usr/var/cache on my system

a "locate cache/fontconfig" leads me to this (among others):
$ ls -ld /Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/var/cache/fontconfig
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 tisdall  staff  68 Jan  4  2013 
/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/var/cache/fontconfig

So, no write permissions for group or other.  Also, the directory is
empty.  What the hell, I try,
chmod 777 /Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/var/cache/fontconfig

didn't solve the problem.



> Have you tried running this lilypond command as the same user as the
> cgi is running under?

...

I see an error message
*** Warning: GenericResourceDir doesn't point to a valid resource directory.
               the -sGenericResourceDir=... option can be used to set this.

There is a lot of font stuff including warnings.  Looks like it's setting up 
caches,
and then probably the FcFontSetList rescan 30seconds configuration kicks in ...
it's an attractive theory.

To repeat: I attach the verbose output.  I realize you are busy, hopefully 
you've got me started
down the happy path, thanks so much I really appreciate this.

> Try setting LILYPOND_VERBOSE=1


I also reinstalled, and further installed the development version.