Re: [gentoo-user] Slow application start, LC_CTYPE and XCreateFontSet

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

Initially I had similar behavior as you, except that en_US.UTF-8 was 
faster and others slower (my laptop is a 1.8 GHz AMD64).

But, after repeated invocations of 'time xterm ...' all versions 
settled down to the same value: ~0.25 seconds.

Maybe you should post your question on some X-related mailing list.

--- Vladimir

on 07/21/2008 04:36 PM Zdenek Travnicek said the following:
> Hello,
>
> I've installed new laptop few weeks ago and everything is running fine
> except for all (most?) X applications taking few seconds to start.
> I've tracked the problem down with ltrace to "XCreateFontSet()" call
> that blocks for more than 2 seconds.
> Searching on google lead me some forums about problem with this call and
> UTF-8 encodings.
> Further tests showed that the problem is related only to having locale
> set to en_US.UTF-8.
> Setting locale to anything else seems to solve it (even en_US)
>
> $ time LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 xterm -e echo
> real    0m2.422s
> user    0m0.010s
> sys     0m0.012s
>
> $ time LC_ALL=cs_CZ.UTF-8 xterm -e echo
>
> real    0m0.065s
> user    0m0.048s
> sys     0m0.010s
>
> That's probably the reason I never saw it before, I usually have some
> non-english locale on my system. (czech/japanese/russian, none of them
> affected)
> Specificaly, it seems to be related to LC_CTYPE setting.
>
> strace shows lots output similar to:
> poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 1, -1) = 1
> read(3,
> "\1\0\212\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\351\0\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0",
> 32) = 32
> writev(3, [{"1\1\t\0\1\0\32\0", 8}, {"*-*-*-*-*-*-KSC5601.1987-0", 26},
> {"\0\0", 2}], 3) = 36
> read(3, 0x7fff831995a0, 32)             = -1 EAGAIN (Resource
> temporarily unavailable)
>
>
> I tried to generate al locales with 'locale-gen -A' and to install some
> other fonts (to have the same font set as on other machine where it
> works fine) and nothing helped at all.
>
> Any ideas how can I solve it?
> Does it mean that I'm missing some fonts? Or something else? I'm running
> out of ideas what to try...
>
>
> my X server is xorg-server-1.3.0.0-r6 compiled with USE: dri
> input_devices_joystick input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse
> input_devices_synaptics ipv6 nptl sdl video_cards_nv video_cards_nvidia
> video_cards_vesa xorg xprint
> I generated all possible locales with locale-gen -A
> I use fluxbox-1.0.0-r2
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated
>
> Zdenek Travnicek
>

-- 
Vladimir G. Ivanovic