[cairo] 1.1.6 to 1.2.0 performance

[John Ellson]

Ujjwal Dasgupta wrote:
>
> The noticable (to the eye) lowering of performance mainly occured in text
> rendering.


I suspect the problem is fontconfig.

I'm a graphviz developer, and dot, which is a command line utility from 
graphviz, uses: pango+cairo+fontconfig+freetype
Every time I run dot it opens 940 files in /var/cache fontconfig  just 
to resolve "Times-Roman" !

    $ strace dot hello.dot 2>&1 | grep open | grep /var/cache/fontconfig 
| wc
        940    3760   79900

Its not a problem specific to graphviz, or even cairo.  The fontconfig 
utility fc-match has the same problem:

    $ strace /usr/bin/fc-match serif 2>&1 | grep open | grep 
/var/cache/fontconfig | wc
        940    3760   79900

Perhaps this doesn't matter much for a gui appplication, but its a major 
problem for command line, or web-server applications.

John