Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Bastian M. <bma...@we...>]

Am 17.02.2012 19:16, schrieb Juhász Péter:
> 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
>

Finally, I have been able to reproduce this delay on a Vista machine 
using Tatsuro Matsuoka's 4.5 and 4.6rc1 builds. Note that the "small" 
4.5 build which does not include cairo and wxt terminals does not show 
the delay on start-up.
Also, I do not see any notable delay using my own build (including wxt 
and cairo), see
http://gnuplot.info/development/binaries/
Is anybody able to reproduce this observation?

   Bastian