TMitchell said:
Older versions of Windows reportedly had a problem (slow down of certain
ops) if too many fonts were installed. Is this true for Win 7 and, if
so, how many are too many?
The performance issue was how long to load them into memory on Windows
startup. Once you login, there's no performance issue because it's the
same time to read from anywhere in memory hence why it's called RAM. If
the performance of optimization you are attempting to improve is boot
time for Windows then reducing your fonts will help (by maybe 2-4
seconds if you're lucky, or typically no reduction in boot time). I'm
assuming you have a mechanical disk platter device for your hard disk
instead of an SSD. You could use xbootmgr.exe to see if the font count
makes a difference in the time to boot Windows. It's a Microsoft tool
(
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801) but usable only
on versions of Windows *after* XP. Folks that report using it to
measure the effect of font count on boot time and paring down from 282
fonts down to the standard set of 40 fonts saw no change in boot time.
That's the effect on Windows boot time when having lots of fonts (I'm
talking about hundreds of fonts and not tens of thousands). As for
applications, well, they're going to have to populate their buffers with
the titles of all those fonts and then let you scroll through them. It
will take time to cycle through a for-loop to retrieve the font names,
families, and styles. I don't know how long it takes to retrieve a item
from an object that points at the installed fonts but it will take time
to populate a list and the longer the list the longer the time to
populate it.
You can end up with a lot of very similar fonts if you install hundreds
of them. If you use a font viewer or just print out a document showing
lots of fonts, find which ones are very similar, and view and print just
those, you might not be able to discern any difference. At one time, I
had over 650 fonts installed. After spending several evenings going
through them, I found many to be [nearly] identical so I pared them down
to 470. That's still a lot which means having to go through a long list
to find the one(s) that you want. It would be handy if a history or
tracking info were stored on the use of fonts so you could see which
ones you haven't used for several use (that aren't considered standard
fonts normally included in Windows) and then get rid of them. If that
info were available, I could probably get rid of another 200, or more,
of old and never-used fonts.
The more fonts you have, especially from somewhere other than a font
foundary (those that produce them commercially), the more likely you'll
have a corrupted one that can cause problems.
