Re: [matplotlib-devel] font problems: fc-list takes up 100% of CPU and runs forever

[Russell E. O. <ro...@uw...>]

In article <524...@st...>,
 Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> 
 wrote:

> I haven't heard of this issue before.
> 
> fc-list comes from the fontconfig project.  It is used to get a list of 
> all of the fonts installed on the system.  It sounds like there is some 
> bug there -- the usual culprit is that there is a slightly non-standard 
> font installed on the system and fontconfig has a hard time parsing it.  
> You could try updating fc-list (it's in all the major package managers).
> 
> As for a workaround from our end, we could try to set a timeout on 
> fc-list and just skip it if it takes too long.  We can't rely on it 
> being there on a Mac at all, so already we gracefully degrade to a less 
> thorough search for fonts when fc-list can't be found.

Thanks for the advice. A defective font is an interesting possibility.

I was wrong it's new in 1.3.0; turns out it's seen in much older 
versions of my application (back to using mpl 1.0.0), but apparently on 
few machines. 

The issue showed up when I added some fancy animated strip charts to my 
application (which may be a coincidence), not when I upgraded mpl.

I'm surprised the timeout on fc-list isn't working. Maybe something else 
is also using fc-list, but the fix is to add an ~/.matplotlib dir, which 
suggests it's an mpl issue.

-- Russell