Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 18:56 +0100, Bastian Märkisch wrote:
> 
> Am 17.02.2012 18:46, schrieb Ethan A Merritt:
> > 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
> >
> 
> The cairo terminals no longer use the fontconfig mechanism of Windows, 
> so this particular issue should have been solved.
> On the other hand I vaguely remember a similar report a while ago, but I 
> couldn't reproduce on various XP, Vista and 7 machines.
> 

On further testing I've noticed that there *is* a slight delay on
startup even on the Win7 machine (4-5 seconds). This means that even
something like 'gnuplot -e "print 1"' takes this much time.

Péter Juhász