Re: [Devel] 2.1.9 Tagged in CVS

[Werner LEMBERG]

> By the way, I've added a new benchmark to "ftbench", used to measure
> the performance of (FT_New_Face/FT_Done_Face). This allowed me to
> spot a _serious_ performance problem when the BDF/PCF drivers are
> listed before the TrueType/Type1 ones in "ftmodule.h"
> 
> The reason is that these drivers do allocate very large buffers to
> either perform decompression or parsing, even if this is only to
> test a few bytes in the font file header to check the format. This
> is a bit stupid.

At least the BDF driver has not been written with speed in mind,
AFAIK.

>    I'm thinking about rewriting the gzip module to simply uncompress
>    the whole file in memory in one pass, instead of resetting the
>    decompression each time we seek back in the file.  Given that we
>    only use this for small PCF or BDF files, it shouldn't be a big
>    problem in practice (and who does use large bdf.gz files anyway
>    :-)

Ideally, putting the whole file in memory should be done only for
small fonts.  I don't know enough how gzip works, but is it possible
to have a threshold for this so that larger fonts are handled as-is?


    Werner