Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

On Sat, 2012-02-25 at 09:04 +0100, Bastian Märkisch wrote:
> 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


Thanks for the followup. 

I did use Tatsuro Matsuoka's "full" win32 package. With that, I observed
a startup delay of a few seconds on all (real) windows machines I've
tried.
I haven't tried other builds yet, but I'll try them today.

Péter Juhász