acroread-7.0.5 is starting more than 2 minuts

radfoj

Hi,

just updated acroread from version 7.0.1.1 to 7.0.5 and its starting more than 2 minutes. Its not only for the first time, after launching and closing him, second run takes ages too. I am not sure, but previous started for the first time under 20 sec, second start was really quick. Deleting .adobe didnt help. I tried now run "strace acroread" and before acreread windows shows up - CPU is used on 100% and there are many many lines about fonts like this:

i92guboj · Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 12:48 pm Post subject:

Not sure, but just an idea: have you compiled xorg without support for the bitmap fonts (USE="-bitmap-fonts")? or, maybe, are you using the modular release?

Seems that acroread is trying to find those fonts and cannot find them, but not sure if that is really the problem. Acroread under linux is really a pain. Shame on adobe...
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metalshark · Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 12:51 pm Post subject: No your not

Ended up removing loads of .gz'ed bitmap fonts and trimming down the ttf's.

Didn't improve the speed that much (AMD Athlon-xp).

There are some plugins that I ended up taking out - one didn't like anti-aliasing as far as I could tell (didn't really look into that far - acroread opened fast enough and had what I wanted job done

).

Try taking out some plugins into a spare dir.

Messing around with fonts seems to be a red herring but trimming down your fonts (especially bitmap'ed ones) is always a good idea (just keep the ones you use).

Hydonsingore · n00b Joined: 03 May 2004 Posts: 21 Location: Taiwan

Removal of ~/.adobe/Acrobat/7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst seems to stop the font-searching behavior. However it's annoying to do this manually every time starting Adobe Reader.

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

Getting the same messages in strace about the fonts but its only taking about 20 seconds for the program to come up (which is too long anyway. kpdf opens in like 2 seconds).

The font files its looking for do exist though and I have read permissions on them.

Fritz Heinrichmeyer

acroread 7.0.5 starts fast with xorg-x11-7.0 only when

~/.adobe/Acrobat//7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst

is removed. Should i also install all 75dpi fonts?

labba · Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 3:06 pm Post subject:

I've got the same problem.
Thanks for the tip to remove this cache file!
Don't know if it's a good idea, but I just put

whatzdaname · n00b Joined: 30 Mar 2003 Posts: 24 Location: Earth

Same problem here.

acroread-7.0.1.1 is working okay but the new acroread-7.0.5 is giving problems.
Hope this problem is solved soon since I'm pretty happy with the new printing menu in acroread-7.0.5.

Just filed a bugzilla report.

Edit: Well, got the following answer from bugzilla within 5 minutes of posting

I don't see what we could fix here. Complain to Adobe, please.

Fritz Heinrichmeyer

First i suspected acrobat to need xlsfonts, xorg-x11 modular does not install xlsfonts by default, older releases do, so i do not think that the problem is gone by installing xlsfonts.

What helped was to replace .adobe/Acrobat/7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst by a zero size file with "rm <fn>" and "touch <fn>".

Now it behaves like old outdated software:

It is snappy on my > 1 GHz PC.

whatzdaname · n00b Joined: 30 Mar 2003 Posts: 24 Location: Earth

Thanks, Fritz!

Worked like a charm.

kenyon · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:11 am Post subject:

I was having acroread startup problems after the upgrade to 7.0.5. After rm -rf ~/.adobe, problems seem to have gone away.

azp · Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 10:28 am Post subject:

I have the same problem, posted a note about it in another thread. I'll try the solutions presented here and see where it gets me! =)

[EDIT]:

It's 5 seconds better than before... Now acroread starts in:

Teetante · Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 10:44 am Post subject:

Had the same problem and the "rm UnixFnt07.lst; touch UnixFnt07.lst" thingy helped.
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mu-sly · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2006 5:28 pm Post subject: Summary of the fix

Just to summarize (since it's all said here, but not actually put together in one post), here's what I've found as the best fix:

As root, edit /usr/bin/acroread in your text editor of choice. Change the start of the file from this:

azp · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:56 pm Post subject:

John5788 · Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2006 1:50 am Post subject: Re: Summary of the fix

jevidl · Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 10:27 pm Post subject:

A real fix would be nice, but the quick hack in this thread worked like a charm. From a very long startup to split second.

ericding · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2005 Posts: 11

Are you sure that adding this hack to the acroread startup script is actually working?

I find that if I replace UnixFnt07.lst with an empty file, startup times are reduced, but they're hardly split-second. Only if I restart Acrobat Reader soon after I exit it is this the case; if I wait a while, logout and log back in, etc., then try to start up Acrobat again, I'm again seeing startup times on the order of tens of seconds, rather than just a few moments.

I can't believe this made it out the door of Adobe this way; perhaps Gentoo's x.org installation is configured in a way that tickles a bug otherwise unbeknownst to their developers?

ericding · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2005 Posts: 11

FWIW: I just tried running Acrobat Reader 7.0.5 in a clean Fedora Core 4 installation inside VMPlayer, and it started up much more quickly than on Gentoo. Whatever the source of the problem on Gentoo, I doubt Adobe will "fix" it unless someone can pin down what difference between Gentoo and Fedora is making it take so much longer on Gentoo...

ericding · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2005 Posts: 11

So here's some other observations I've made while trying to figure this problem out. I may be barking up the wrong tree, but the basic problem, I believe, has to do with bitmap (100dpi and 75dpi) fonts and their locations on Gentoo.

On Fedora, according to strace, acroread never even looks at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi, and there are no corresponding entries from that directory in UnixFnt07.lst after starting up and exiting acroread.

On Gentoo, on the other hand, according to strace, acroread looks inside every file that's in:

/usr/share/fonts/75dpi
/usr/share/fonts/100dpi
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi

which works out, on my system, to over 7500 bitmap font files -- sort of. The problem's actually worsened because on Gentoo Linux, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts is just a symlink to /usr/share/fonts -- so acroread is doing twice as much work for each of almost 4000 font files, not realizing that it's hitting each one twice. So every one of these files is listed in UnixFnt07.lst, and listed twice!! We're just lucky they don't also look by default in /usr/X11R6/share/fonts (which doesn't exist on Fedora, but is another symlink on Gentoo)! I'm still mystified as to why acroread looks inside the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/*dpi directories on Gentoo but not on Fedora, but even if it didn't look in those on Gentoo, it still wouldn't resolve the problem entirely.

If I rename/remove the symlink in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, this cuts startup time of a clean start of acroread in half. If I change the permissions of the 75dpi and 100dpi directories so that they're only root-readable (i.e., chmod o-rx), then acroread startup time is negligible (!)... so one workaround is to make those readable only to root, but I don't know if that has other undesirable side effects.

I'd welcome any wisdom/suggestions from others...!

Fritz Heinrichmeyer

my problem with acroread came up again, so i deleted the symbolic link /usr/X11R6, then a now dead link in /usr/lib/X11 and
the fonts link in /usr/lib/X11.
That helped together with truncating ~/.adobe/Acrobat/7.0/Cache/UnixFnt07.lst

Truncation the mentioned file cuts down startup from 7.6 seconds to 3.2 here.
Btw. the file had 34528 lines on my system. Maybe i have too much fonts?

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3140

Well it looks like acroread-7.0.5 is marked stable, but long delay in starting it still exists.

lost-distance · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 56

Here's my solution. It's persistent, and perhaps more elegant than editing /usr/bin/acroread:

ericding · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2005 Posts: 11

at240 · l33t Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 603 Location: UK