[tex-live] xe(la)ex and font searching delay

[Ulrike Fischer]

Since some time I observe a problem with xelatex and its font
search.   

Today I had a quite extreme example. xelatex hanged so long when
loading size10.clo (where in the newest format the latin modern open
type fonts are loaded) that I at first thought there were a loop
somewhere. 

The delay could be seen in miktex, in texlive 2014 (in this case
with a document) and texlive 2016. But miktex and texlive 2014
behaved again after I waited long enough so that the compilation
succeded. 

With texlive 2016 the only thing that helps is to call 
  fc-cache -f 

Imho the only thing I did that could be font related was to install
a few .ttf fonts in a local texmf tree to try out an example on
tex.sx. 

My impression is that xelatex realizes that the fonts have changes
and triggers the recreation of the cache but that the cache is then
not correctly stored and so is recreated at every compilation until
a manual fc-cache -f corrects the situation.

I'm on windows 10 and installed texlive in my normal user account. 


-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/