Re: LilyPond Very Slow on Vista

[Jose Mena]

Jose Mena <jmena <at> princeton.edu> writes:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I'm new to LilyPond, but I've noticed that the binary I have installed on
> Windows Vista is extremely slow.  I've poked around on the bug report archive
> trying to find a solution to my problem, and none has presented itself.  When 
> I
> call LilyPond slow, I mean that it takes a good 1-3 minutes on a very nice
> machine running the not-very-nice Vista to create a .png file of one measure 
> of
> SATB partwriting.  I do not think that this is the performance the developers
> intended.  I've decided that this problem is due to the fact that every time I
> run LilyPond in verbose mode the majority of the runtime is spent with me
> waiting at "Building font database."  It makes sense to me that the font
> database would need building, say, the first time the program is run, but I'm
> left to wonder why the database doesn't persist (it would make runtime 100x
> faster).  Is there anything that I can do to fix this?  I'm running LilyPond
> 2.10.33 (the latest version).
> 
> Thanks,
> Jose Mena
> 

So I ran some tests with the following LilyPond code that I pulled 
from the website.
%% Generated by lilypond-book.py
%% Options: [quote,alt=[image of music],ragged-right,indent=0\mm]
\include "lilypond-book-preamble.ly"
% ****************************************************************
% Start cut-&-pastable-section 
% ****************************************************************
\paper {
  #(define dump-extents #t)
  
  line-width = 160\mm - 2.0 * 0.4\in
  ragged-right = ##t
  indent = 0\mm
  force-assignment = #""
  line-width = #(- line-width (* mm  3.000000))
}
\layout {
  
}
% ****************************************************************
% ly snippet:
% ****************************************************************
\sourcefileline 103
{
  c' e' g' e'
}
% ****************************************************************
% end ly snippet
% ****************************************************************

It's a simple one-line melody, and I'd expect this to take no time 
for LilyPond to compile.  And in my Ubuntu 7.11 virtual machine, 
it does indeed take no time. My test had the code compiling in about 
3.5 seconds.  The astonishing thing is the difference in Windows 
Vista.  This short code clocked in at 45 seconds of compile time.  
So, as I asked earlier: does anybody know what's going on here? It 
doesn't look like my Ubuntu install is even doing what the Windows 
version is hanging on- the "Building font database" thing.  

Any help would be appreciated.

-Jose