GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 456799
"Fonts" cause load time to be 5X previous version
Last modified: 2008-01-15 13:28:51 UTC
I upgraded from 2.2.14 to 2.2.16, and all of a sudden when I load GIMP it takes around 2 full minutes, rather than 15 seconds. This is because it spends about 1 minute 30 seconds loading fonts. What has caused this sudden huge increase in load time? With this increase, loading GIMP quickly to do a resize or crop on an image is now impossible. I have tried deleting the fonts folder that GIMP supposedly uses (although this folder registered as being empty) but to no avail. Thanks for listening, hope this can be solved quickly, it's getting more annoying all the time.
Did you read the FAQ at http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/faq.html ? This problem is described there.
So, I have the same issue. I'm running version 2.2.16 with GTK 2.10.13 on Windows Vista Home Basic. It appears that GIMP is not able to create the .fonts.cache-1 file as I don't have one to delete. I tried running GIMP as administrator (assuming it was a permission issue) with no success. Other files like the .thumbnails are there and appear to be updating fine. This appears to only be an issue on startup.
I did have a .fonts.cache-1 file, but deleting it as per the FAQ didn't change the load time. I'm not sure if this is odd, but I have retried loading GIMP several times with different settings, and it has yet to be re-created. Removing about half my default fonts isn't changing it either. I am running Vista Home Premium, and I think the problem may be caused by the very large number of fonts that are installed by default in Vista. (415 on my system, and that's after removing a bunch that were installed by Office. Possibly the 2.2.16 release fixed an issue that caused GIMP not to load the fonts in 2.2.14 (I never used the text tool in 2.2.14, so I don't know if it worked). I use GIMP primarily for photo-retouching/photo-manipulation art. Also, I tried uninstalling 2.2.16 and reinstalling 2.2.14 (I happened to have a backup of the installer) but it did not fix the load time. I am currently running GIMP using the --no-fonts argument, and the load time is now back to the 15 seconds it was before the update. However, I think the problem could be easily fixed if the GIMP could be setup to load only the fonts that are in the .gimp-2.2\fonts folder, instead of the system wide fonts. The website tells how to do this in Linux, but we're both on windows, so how would this be done in windows?
This is most likely a duplicate of bug #154968, which also refers to slow loading of fonts in Vista Home Premium (and several users who were affected when upgrading from XP to Vista). That bug also mentions that the newer GIMP uses newer versions of gtk+ and fontconfig, and the problem seems to be related to these libraries. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 154968 ***