Inkscape 0.91 on Windows hangs when launching (rebuilding font caches)

[Amr Bekhit]

I'm using Inkscape 0.91 x64 on a Windows 8.1 x64 machine. When launching Inkscape from the dekstop icon, the program will hang for about a minute, taking up a full CPU core and with nothing displayed on the screen. Eventually the program will then load as normal. The PC is quite powerful (Core i7 920, 18GB RAM, 240GB SSD, Dual AMD Radeon HD 6800) and has recently been reformatted.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

1) Which installer package did you use for Inkscape 0.91? (32bit|64bit; msi|exe|paf.exe|7z)
2) Do the long launch times persist after the initial launch of the application right after installation? The initial run right after the installation takes longer because the font caches need to be built by fontconfig; later runs however can reuse the existing cache files and should not take that long. We did have reports in the past though that the portable versions of Inkscape for Windows do not keep the cache files (bug #1196373, bug #1021815).

[Amr Bekhit (amrbekhit)]

Hello,

It appears that you are correct regarding the font caches. I was installing new fonts on to my system when I first reported the issue. I've since tested this again as follows:

* Ran Inkscape (took 4s to load).
* Closed it.
* Installed a new font on to my system.
* Ran Inkscape again (took about 55s to load).
* Closed it.
* Ran Inkscape for a third time (took 4s to load).

So, yes it appears that rebuilding the font cache is taking quite a while.

As a side note, it would be great if there was at least some UI to indicate that the program is doing because a hang of one minute with no indication to the user is quite confusing.

[Amr Bekhit (amrbekhit)]

In answer to your first question, I installed Inkscape using the inkscape-0.91-x64.msi package.

[Brynn (brynn4inks-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this is still happening in 0.92.1. Normally it takes Inkscape 8 to 10 seconds to open. But if I install even just 1 new font, the next time I open Inkscape it takes nearly a minute to open.

Windows 7, 64-bit, Inkscape 0.92.1, 64-bit, exe installer

Any further info needed, let me know.

Thank you very much :-)

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

I'm going to mark this a duplicate of bug #1528629 (while it was filed later it is much more active and has more information).

Everybody affected might be delighted to hear there are some recent efforts to make the caching process faster, see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64766