rxvt-unicode extremely slow to start

[Clemens Lang]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 09:19:24PM -0400, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> Some time within the last month or so, urxvt (from the rxvt-unicode
> package) has become very slow to start, taking on the order of 20
> seconds to display the window after I launch it.  Once the window's
> up, everything works just fine: the shell or whatever program starts
> immediately, the window is responsive to user input, and the window
> disappears immediately after exiting the shell or whatever.

Smells an aweful lot like a font-cache update going on in the
background. Start urxvt under opensnoop:

 Shell 1: sudo opensnoop -n rxvt-unicode (or whatever the process name is)
 Shell 2: urxvt

If it shows opening thousands of font files it's updating the font
cache. The question then would be why it doesn't keep the cache. Maybe
the location where it tries to put the cache isn't writable?

-- 
Clemens