[Fontconfig] Fontconfig terribly slow (locally installed)

[Saurabh T]

Hi all,

(I sent this email before but according to the archives it didnt go thru perhaps because I wasnt subscribed to the list, so I subscribed and am sending it again)

I have fontconfig 2.3.2 installed locally on my solaris 8 machine as I dont have root access. This means it cant build a cache of the fonts in /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts etc where it's been pointed to, so it occasionally updates my ~/.fonts.cache-1 (I have no idea under what circumstances this happens).
 
I then built gd (2.0.35) against this fontconfig, and graphviz (2.20.2) against the gd. Now, the "dot" of graphviz slows down tremendously (class collaboration graph generation time for our code base went from ~1 hr using dot with gd w/o fc to *2 days* and counting using dot w. gd w. fc).
 
In another case, acroread (v 7) takes a couple of minutes to load sometimes. I wrote some code in fontconfig to not save ~/.fonts.cache-1 unless it's older than a configurable number of days, and this may have solved the acroread problem (although the startup delay was off-and-on so I'm not sure), but the dot one remains.
 
Any ideas on how to speed up fontconfig in these scenarios? Or something I'm missing?
 
Thanks.
Saurabh
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