[Fontconfig] performance issue questions

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 11/23/16 12:13 PM, L. A. Walsh wrote:
> 4) why not run the font-config every night to check if things
> are up-to-date.  That would have painlessly updated my
> cache before I next used it.

I think this is more of a packaging & integration problem than something
upstream can solve.   There is no central fontconfig daemon to run this
task regularly, so it would fall to a system specific method - crontab,
systemd timers, SMF periodic services, Windows Task Scheduler, etc.
and you'd have to take into account machines that aren't running 24x7,
whether it's a laptop that's carried around and not always plugged in
or a desktop that gets shut off every night and powered on the next day.

In the Solaris fontconfig packages I maintain, we have a service to run
fc-cache at system boot and at package install time.  (Running at boot is
mainly to deal with installs of packages to boot environments when they're
not booted, which is how most of our OS install & upgrade methods work.)
We don't have it scheduled to run periodically because we don't have
lots of things installing new fonts without going through our package
manager, but of course, if some sysadmin did that, they can easily make
their own cron job or periodic service to do it.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-              alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc