OLS: On how user space sucks

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 21, 2006 13:10 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786)
In reply to: OLS: On how user space sucks by nix
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

> If you're not told how expensive some function call is, the only way to
> tell is to profile the hell out of it *on a system where n happens to be
> large* (so fontconfig sloth might not be obvious unless, like davej, you
> have many thousands of fonts),

Actually when I half a year ago installed Breezy on a P166, I found
that simple Xlib based programs (xeys, xclock...) took actually twice
as long (10 secs) to start than e.g. Gnome calculator or Abiword
which were using fontconfig through Xft through Pango. So, I would
say that it's an improvement over what was before. :-)

When I straced the Xlib programs, most of the time seemed to be going to
loading information about Asian bitmap based X fonts. It would have been
nice if the other bitmap fonts (for example everything besides the cursor
and fixed font) would have been in separate package that is installed only
when needed.

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