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Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista


From: Hajo Dezelski
Subject: Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:48:42 +0100

Trevor,
I wouldnt look in the first place at problems of Lilypond. I presume that it is a problem of Vista which has too many processes running in the background. You will find, that nearly all programs run slower on this OS. And even when you only need 10 seconds it is too much compared to what the processor could manage. You have a machine with much more horsepower under the hood compared to the "old" systems. And this system performance should not be consumed by the OS.

Of course a normal user working only with Vista will not notice the difference. If you have the possibilty to install XP on your laptop I am sure that you will be astonished what you computer will be able to perform. We have tried that with different programs on different machines and nearly always had success.

Hajo

2008/11/13 Trevor Daniels <address@hidden>

Mats, when I first obtained my laptop, c. March 08, I did a LilyPond installation with the then current 2.11 version on a clean system.  So there were no lilypond font caches present.  The performance was fine then and has been fine ever since.  soon after, I tried various ways to cause the performance to degrade in an attempt to isolate the problem being experienced by others, but nothing I did had any effect - the performance always has been and still is good.

In an attempt to isolate the problem again, I have just created a .fontconfig directory(empty, as I don't know what it should contain), downloaded 2.11.63 and reinstalled it.  But it still compiles a 3-page file in just under 10 sec, (15 sec on first run).  If I could ever get my system to run slowly we would have the answer, but now I'm out of ideas.

Trevor

Mats Bengtsson wrote Thursday, November 13, 2008 11:44 AM



Trevor, perhaps it's the other way around, that you don't suffer from the problems,
since you already have a working cache file. Have you tried removing all your
cache files (of course, keeping a back-up in a safe place) and trying the latest
installation?

  /Mats

Trevor Daniels wrote:
Jonathan

The slowness is certainly not inherently due to Vista
as LilyPond has always run fine under Vista here.  The
slowness issue was discussed at some length back in
March 08 on both -user and -bug when it was determined
that it was due to font building.  This is almost certainly
is cause of the recently reported slowness.  Incidentally,
a similar issue made LilyPond slow under XP too, and this
was fixed with the 2.11.43 release.

I don't understand the technical issues, but on Vista
the fonts are contained in ~\.lilypond-fonts.cache-2.
(To see these make sure you have the options set in
Windows Explorer to Show hidden file and folders.)
This should contain a number of smaller files (>=2)
and one large file, c. 800Kb on my system.  Check the
date/time the large file was last modified.  It should
only be changed infrequently (I don't know what triggers
it.)  If it changes on every LP run, then this is the cause
of the slowness.  Two of the smaller files should be rebuilt
on the first run after a new install, which causes the
this first run to take more time, around 20 secs more,
than subsequent runs.

So what might cause this incorrect font cache rebuild?

In the past, one cause was an incorrect version of
libfontconfig-1.dll but this is unlikely now as the
appropriate version of this dll is included with
every binary.  Another possibility is that when this dll
searches for the font cache it checks for an old cache
first.  The fonts used to be cached in ~\.fontconfig.
If such a directory is present it might be worth trying
deleting it or moving it to another directory.

Trevor



----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Kulp" <address@hidden>
To: "Tim Slattery" <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista


Tim Slattery wrote:
Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:

545 Defect Verified Medium ---- v.villenave    LilyPond is excessively slow on Windows Vista   Performance fixed_2_11_43
Rob,

Have you checked that it's slow the _second_ time you run a file?  It will be slow the first time it runs because it needs to build a font cache, but successive times should not be slow.

On my Vista system, when I invoke Lilypond I get the GNU version
notice, and then.....

it sits for almost 50 seconds, apparently doing NOTHING. Then it wakes
up and processes the file. It's still usable, but it sure slows things
down.


For the sake of testing, I booted into my Vista Home Premium partition and installed the latest Lilypond binary from the download page.  I ran a lilypond file once and it took about 90 seconds, then ran it a second time and it took more than 60 seconds.  The same file on Linux compiles in less than 2 seconds.  Honestly I don't know how anyone uses Vista as their main OS.  This is a reasonably powerful laptop less than 6 months old with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor.  I have all the aero eye candy disabled and it still runs 10x slower than the 8-year-old Gateway box in my office running Ubuntu 8.04.  Man.  Glad to be back on the Linux side :)

Jon
--
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com


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--
=============================================
Mats Bengtsson
Signal Processing
School of Electrical Engineering
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
Sweden
Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463 Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
Email: address@hidden
WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
=============================================





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