[Nautilus-list] eel& smooth text & startup performance

[Christian Glodt <christian glodt ist lu>]

Hello,

for as long as I remember, when I first start nautilus, I have
a delay of about 30 seconds before a window shows up.
During this time I have some disk activity, but nearly
no cpu load.

Playing around with eel, I think I found the cause of this delay.
Some part of eel mmaps every single font on my system. I observed
this by stracing eel test programs like 'test-eel-label-simple' and
'test-eel-smooth-text-layout'. After this has happened once, the
fonts are in the disk cache, and further performance is more or
less ok.

Now, if mmapping every single font could be avoided, a nice bit of
startup performance might be gained. This may however be dependent
on the number of fonts installed. On my system, test-eel-smooth-text-
layout opens 4243 font files, according to strace.

If this is all fine and dandy, and the way it should be, I'd please like
to know where I can configure font paths for eel. I don't really need it
to support all my fonts. Currently it looks in
/opt/gnome/share/eel/fonts/urw and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/*, and I'd
be content to just use the fonts in my gnome tree.

Anyway, with the port to gtk2 and pango, this will hopefully become a
non-issue.

I use nautilus and eel from gnome-1 cvs branch.

Greets,

Christian Glodt