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Windows 10 allows you to install Fonts per user or system wide. That local directory is what's being identified in this blog post. It's a non-sequitur. Havin

Windows 10 allows you to install Fonts per user or system wide. That local directory is what's being identified in this blog post. It's a non-sequitur. Having too many fonts can cause performance regressions in software but it's not Window's fault. Those apps generate a font cache for their UI to make it easier to select a font. Depending on how that's implemented it can be slow to generate. I don't see anything in this blog post to indicate the offending Apps are using a native Windows UI for displaying fonts that is performing poorly. This is like complaining that searching is slow when you have too many files on your HDD.

jwells89 3y ago
Furthermore, ideally shouldn't font caching be offloaded to a background thread and performed after startup? That seems like the best way to handle the issue with the only user impact being a briefly disabled font chooser. That said I could totally see tangled balls of mud and spaghetti like Photoshop requiring synchronous font caching to function.
babypuncher 3y ago
Perhaps they should consider saving that font cache to the disk so you only need to add new fonts to it on startup.
- cptskippy 3y ago
  Again, that's application specific implementation details and not a Windows problem.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Windows could provide an API that has a font cache, which other programs can use to quickly get all fonts if they need to. Linux for example has fontconfig with a metadata cache "fc-cache" https://man.archlinux.org/man/fc-cache.1.en https://man.archlinux.org/man/fc-cache.1.en
    - cptskippy 3y ago
      Windows has a Font Cache service that runs in the background so I would imagine they do. I'm not a Desktop Developer so I'm not all that familiar with the Windows API. But like any system, just because a convenient API exists that doesn't mean developers know about or use it. Especially with cross platform solutions, developers will opt not to use a particular API because it complicates things. My guess is that these are poorly optimized Apps and the blogger is blaming the OS for their offenses.

jwells89 3y ago

Furthermore, ideally shouldn't font caching be offloaded to a background thread and performed after startup? That seems like the best way to handle the issue with the only user impact being a briefly disabled font chooser. That said I could totally see tangled balls of mud and spaghetti like Photoshop requiring synchronous font caching to function.

babypuncher 3y ago

Perhaps they should consider saving that font cache to the disk so you only need to add new fonts to it on startup.

cptskippy 3y ago
Again, that's application specific implementation details and not a Windows problem.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Windows could provide an API that has a font cache, which other programs can use to quickly get all fonts if they need to. Linux for example has fontconfig with a metadata cache "fc-cache" https://man.archlinux.org/man/fc-cache.1.en https://man.archlinux.org/man/fc-cache.1.en
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    Windows has a Font Cache service that runs in the background so I would imagine they do. I'm not a Desktop Developer so I'm not all that familiar with the Windows API. But like any system, just because a convenient API exists that doesn't mean developers know about or use it. Especially with cross platform solutions, developers will opt not to use a particular API because it complicates things. My guess is that these are poorly optimized Apps and the blogger is blaming the OS for their offenses.