Re: Severe performance issues with pkgsrc-2006Q3?

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006 19:49:26 +0100
Christian Biere <christianbiere%gmx.de@localhost> wrote:

> Greg Troxel wrote:
> > Christian Biere <christianbiere%gmx.de@localhost> writes:
> > > Hauke Fath wrote:
> > >> The machines offer KDE, Gnome, XFCE4 and your favourite window 
> > >> manager as environment via gdm, but the problem seems to concern
> > >> all of them. As an example, when I log in to XFCE4, first
> > >> opening of a popup menu from xfce4-panel takes 15 sec on an AMD
> > >> 700 MHz / 384 MB RAM.
> 
> > > Have you traced them? Font loading time is very likely the issue.
> > > My apps seemingly spent most and too much time at that step as
> > > well. Albeit it's not as horrible as in your examples.
> > 
> > I had trouble with gqview taking a long time to start up.
> 
> Who did you know I was referring to gqview?
> 
> > Rebuilding fontconfig caches with fc-cache (as root) turned out to
> > be the required step to fix it.
> 
> Exactly, now it really starts ~30 seconds faster or IOW,
> instantanenously.
> 
> One problem with fc-cache is that it doesn't show useful error
> messages. I had to trace it to see where it wants to write to.
> Apparently, it stores its stuff under /var/cache/fontconfig/*. So
> that should be world-readable and writeable by the pkgsrc install
> user.
> 
Hmm -- if you run any linux emulation programs, such as acroread,
firefox-bin, or soffice, you should probably
run /emul/linux/usr/bin/fc-cache as well.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb