07:10 <dnkl> lechner: from what I can tell, fontconfig is loading the cache properly. It isn't loading the actual fonts. Which would mean the problem is NFS. Even though the font data is cached, it still need to access a lot of files.

13:24 <lechner> Arnavion: .local/share/fonts is the newer location, right. I thing I should at least copy all fonts there

13:26 <lechner> dnkl: thangs for the explanations! does that sound like a bug in fontconfig in spirit? it seems like caching is implemented only partially

13:31 <lechner> dnkl: or maybe fc does not cache some aspect of your missing glyphs search

13:38 <dnkl> lechner: don't think there's a bug here. Having caches on network drives is just bad, in general.

13:38 <dnkl> It does cache everything we need. From your trace we can see that it does NOT load the fonts themselves. Just the cache files

13:38 <lechner> dnkl: doesn't it still stat 8000 files?

13:40 <dnkl> It does. Because fontconfig, by design, had one cache file for either each font file, or each font *directory* (but sure which), it still needs to stat all those cache files

13:40 <dnkl> It also looks like it first tries in /var/... before looking in ~/.cache

13:40 <dnkl> S/but/not

13:42 <lechner> i see

13:43 <lechner> thanks for the research! it still seems like a high price to pay for whatever foot needs

13:47 <dnkl> This shouldn't be foot specific. But it _may_ be possible to defer some of this to when we want to (maybe) load a fallback font

13:48 <dnkl> If you're not seeing this delay in other applications, they might be doing similar

13:51 <dnkl> lechner: looks like fontconfig stats all font *directories*. If I'm right, you should see a huge improvement if you dump all fonts in the same directory (with no sub-directories)

13:55 <dnkl> lechner: fwiw, I tried commenting out *all* code that deals with the fallback fonts, and fontconfig still stat:ed all my font directories

13:59 <dnkl> lechner: if you can compile fcft yourself (or build foot against a patched fcft sub-project), you could try patching line 436, and change FcTrue to FcFalse in the FcFontSort call

14:00 <dnkl> I doubt this will make a difference, so probably not worth the trouble if you're not sure how to do it

14:08 <lechner> dnkl: thanks! my issue is probably that the cache is on NFS as well, and kept on a per-font basis

16:34 <lechner> dnkl: fwiw, i consolidated my fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts, which according to fc-list | wc -l brought them down to 5200 and ran fc-cache -f as user. now foot starts up in one second. thanks for all your help earlier, everyone!

17:20 <dnkl> lechner: glad you worked it out :)

17:23 <lechner> sorry to take up your valuable time