Bug 8264 - Font cache startup delay on newer distributions
Summary: Font cache startup delay on newer distributions
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: ThinLinc
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Other (show other bugs)
Version: trunk
Hardware: PC Unknown
: P2 Normal
Target Milestone: MediumPrio
Assignee: Bugzilla mail exporter
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2023-12-07 16:23 CET by Pierre Ossman
Modified: 2024-01-25 13:23 CET (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Pierre Ossman cendio 2023-12-07 16:23:18 CET
Systems with an up-to-date version of fontconfig will experience a delay the first time each user logs on to the system¹. This is because the cache format has changed, so the fontconfig bundled in ThinLinc cannot use the system cache files and has to generate its own.

The delay depends on how many fonts the system has. It's been between a few seconds to upwards a minute. See bug 7169 and bug 7170.

If we upgrade our fontconfig, we could speed up startup on these systems, but it would move the problem to older systems instead.

The change seems to be in fontconfig 2.14 and newer. We are on fontconfig 2.13.

Known older systems:

Fedora 36
RHEL 8
Ubuntu 22.04

Known never systems:

Fedora 37
RHEL 9
Ubuntu 23.04

¹ Or starts the client on a Linux machine
Comment 1 Pierre Ossman cendio 2023-12-07 16:24:44 CET
To make things worse, the development version of fontconfig has bumped the number again. Likely going live in fontconfig 2.15.

Even more odd, we see that unreleased version 9 for almost all users on our RHEL 8 system. No idea at this point where those cache files are coming from.

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