Re: Low memory hacks

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 15:32 +0000, Brian Nitz wrote:
>
>   
>> But if a 
>> feature isn't used 99.999% of the time and it consumes resources, it 
>> should have an off switch.
>>     
>
> No.  If a feature isn't used 99.999% of the time and it consumes
> resources, it's a bug and should be fixed.
>   
>   
>> Your comments and a couple of experiments with dtrace and various other 
>> tools,  convinced me that it probably isn't worthwhile to restrict the 
>> opening of these font cache files by locale even in cases where they are 
>> remotely mounted via NFS.  (Does anyone remember when Apple system 
>> performance was proportional to the number of installed fonts?)
>>     
>
> Just use latest fontconfig.  It doesn't create cache files on NFS
> anymore.  It's not productive running 3 year old software and talking
> about improvements...
>   
Yes. Unfortunately by time software goes through qualification processes 
and out into production in mid or large size companies, the software 
starts to smell a bit stale. It's a difficult problem to fix. For 
example one customer had to pass every intranet document through a 
qualification process. If anything changed (e.g. The new fontconfig 
prescribes a font which causes a legal document to span onto a second 
page), they had to start the qualification over again!

Thanks for the information. It turns out that while we're keeping up 
with current GNOME builds, fontconfig is delivered by a different team 
with different interface stability requirements.