Re: wxt terminal in windows hangs

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> 2011/1/18 Allin Cottrell wrote:
> >
> > But we're seeing the same, quite mysterious, issue on Windows: the
> > "first" gnuplot plot takes a long time to appear, where "long"
> > can be anything from 5-10 seconds to well over a minute. It looks
> > like the app is off in the ozone, but eventually the plot appears.
> > I'm not sure exactly what "first" means here -- first plot after
> > booting Windows, first plot after initially installing or updating
> > gretl + gnuplot? -- since that seems to vary. But subsequent plots
> > take a sane amount of time (i.e. barely noticeable delay).
> >
> > My first thought on this was that maybe Windows is conducting some
> > elaborate security audit on the toolchain that's involved (GLib,
> > pango and so on), but that's only a wild guess. I wish I
> > understood what's going on, because it creates a very bad
> > impression for new users. (No such problem on Linux or Mac.)
>
> Wait, that sounds familiar!
>
> My bet is that fc-cache runs in the background to regenerate font
> index "every now and then", so that one can use any given font on the
> system.
>
> This doesn't happen on Mac on Linux since fontconfig database update
> runs independently in the background. But if gnuplot is compiled with
> fontconfig under windows it first checks when the database has last
> been generated and if enough time elapsed, it regenerates the database
> which may take pretty long (depending on the number of fonts available
> on the system).

Aha! That sounds quite plausible. Next time I boot windows I'll
try to investigate. I suppose that if I can find the relevant
cache file and delete it, then I ought to be able to provoke the
long wait for a plot?

Allin Cottrell