[cairo] 1.1.6 to 1.2.0 performance

David Turner dturner at nds.com
Tue Jul 11 05:37:09 PDT 2006


Hello John,


> I suspect the problem is fontconfig.
>
> I'm a graphviz developer, and dot, which is a command line utility 
> from graphviz, uses: pango+cairo+fontconfig+freetype
> Every time I run dot it opens 940 files in /var/cache fontconfig  just 
> to resolve "Times-Roman" !
>
>    $ strace dot hello.dot 2>&1 | grep open | grep 
> /var/cache/fontconfig | wc
>        940    3760   79900
>
> Its not a problem specific to graphviz, or even cairo.  The fontconfig 
> utility fc-match has the same problem:
>
>    $ strace /usr/bin/fc-match serif 2>&1 | grep open | grep 
> /var/cache/fontconfig | wc
>        940    3760   79900
>
> Perhaps this doesn't matter much for a gui appplication, but its a 
> major problem for command line, or web-server applications.
>
A recent version of fontconfig should be able to use a global cache, 
instead of having to re-open all font files
on startup. Moreover, FreeType 2.2.1 and later contain several speed-ups 
that might affect performance
positively when opening a lot of font files.

it'd be interesting to know which versions of these libraries you're using.

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)

> John
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cairo mailing list
> cairo at cairographics.org
> http://cairographics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cairo
>


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