Rawhide performance?

[Mike A. Harris]

Trond Eivind Glomsrød wrote:
> Dax Kelson wrote:
> 
>> I installed rawhide on a beefy desktop computer.
>>
>> AMD FX-55 CPU
>> 2GB RAM
>> 300GB SATA RAID1 (testing out the new dmraid integration)
>> Nvidia 6800GT 256MB video (Qty 2 -- SLI)
>> 1600x1200 resolution
>>
>> I haven't quantified it yet, but desktop GNOME performance seems very
>> sluggish. Many seconds to launch apps. Many seconds for the GNOME panel
>> menu to drop down and populate with icons. In general the lack of
>> performance is bad enough to be very noticeable and annoying.
> 
> One trick which improved performance from what you describe to ok for 
> me, was rerunning fc-cache - I had a directory of fonts in my home 
> directory, and it seemed to parse them every time something started.

At some point in FC5 development, a fontconfig update seems to have
been rather buggy, and caused performance problems also.  I don't
know the details, but the package maintainer and others have alluded
to this, and runtime behaviour was certainly suggestive of it as well.

Upon Matthias' request (fontconfig maintainer), I have removed the
fc-cache call from the xfs initscript, which should improve system
boot time, as it no longer mandatorily calls fc-cache.  We're now
relying on font rpm packages to invoke fc-cache directly from %post
and %postun instead.  While this is not directly related to the
thread, part of the reason for the removal, is that I'm told that
if fonts.cache-* files are not present, fc-cache will get ran
automatically at runtime to generate them, but on a per-user
basis instead of systemwide.  That's useful for user ~/.fonts
directories if it works, but it sounds like it doesn't work from
what you're saying.

If that's the case, it's likely to be a fontconfig bug IMHO.



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.