Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Friday, February 17, 2012 09:35:20 am Juhász Péter wrote:
> 
> - On one of my machines, startup appeared to be extremely slow, taking
> about 5 minutes (!). This is true for both the console and GUI versions.
> For the first few tries I've actually killed the process, because I
> didn't have the patience to wait it out. Once it started, it appeared to
> work normally, there were no delays and plotting was instantaneous as
> well. (Older versions had a long delay at the first plot because of
> fontconfig or whatever.)
> This happened in both interactive and non-interactive mode, however,
> only on a virtual machine running Vista. On a real computer running
> Windows 7, startup was instantaneous.

I seem to recall this was discussed a couple of years ago.
The issue then was that if the program did not find a certain set of fonts, 
it triggered creation of a bitmap font set from the underlying font
descriptions.  This was painfully slow but only  happened the first time, 
since subsequent runs would find the  now-created font set.  
However, I wonder if you run under a virtual machine whether every time 
is a "first" time?  Anyhow, my best guess is that this is a font issue
rather than anything to do with gnuplot per se.

	Ethan

> I have no idea what causes this, and why it appears on one machine but
> doesn't on the other. Have any of you experienced anything similar?
> I think this issue is potentially serious, because those who meet with
> it unsuspectingly may end up thinking that gnuplot is completely useless
> - "I've clicked on the icon", they would say, "but nothing happened!"
> 
> - The reworked windows terminal is awesome! To everyone who contributed
> to it: good work! I miss the "previous zoom" button from the wxt
> terminal, though.
> 
> Péter Juhász
>