Tip: Circular Symbolic Links in Fonts Directories Causing Slowdown

I noticed a slowdown recently on my Mandriva Linux Cooker system where X GUI applications would stall for a long time and gdb showed that it happened in fontconfig calls. It happened with all user accounts on the system, including new ones and was not fixed by upgrades. Furthermore, other people who used Cooker did not have it.

Well, today I finally found a solution. Apparently, some of my font directories, contained symbolic links to themselves, which confused fontconfig and caused it to scan them times and again.

To fix the problem, run strace -e open -o fontconfig.strace fc-cache -v, and see if it excessively scans more and more sub-directories under the directory paths. Then move away the offending symbolic links to say /usr/share/REMOVED-fonts.

Now konsole starts instantly, KDE 3 apps no longer become unresponsive when the file with the unicode character, firefox stalls less, and font zoom there is faster. I'm finally happy again.

Syndicated 2008-09-27 19:25:00 from shlomif