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

[Zdenek Travnicek]

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