MacOS startup time is so slow

[vizh]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the bug / provide steps to reproduce it

The promotional materials on the website suggest that the startup time of Sublime and Zed should be practically the same. However, in reality, Sublime starts almost instantly, while Zed takes around 4-5 seconds to display its window. This refers to a clean installation without any additional settings.

Environment

Zed: v0.93.4 (stable)
OS: macOS 13.4.1
Memory: 32 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help explain present your vision of the feature

Screen.Recording.2023-07-10.at.22.24.07.mov

Recorded a video showing the difference in speed between running Zed and Sublime.

If applicable, attach your ~/Library/Logs/Zed/Zed.log file to this issue.

If you only need the most recent lines, you can run the zed: open log command palette action to see the last 1000.

Zed.log

[osiewicz]

Is the startup time slow with copilot disabled too? Based on the logs you've provided the request seems to be timing out.

[vizh]

Is the startup time slow with copilot disabled too? Based on the logs you've provided the request seems to be timing out.

This is a clean installation. No configuration after being copied to the applications directory on a system where it was not previously installed. I checked just now, Copilot is turned off.

Disabling all network interfaces did not speed up the startup process. When no network interfaces are available, any connection attempt is instantly terminated without any waiting period.

[jansol]

Hmm, what buffer font have you set in your config? I managed to get very slow startup times with specific fonts in #4695

[vizh]

Hmm, what buffer font have you set in your config? I managed to get very slow startup times with specific fonts in #4695

You're right! Just removed Iosevka from config and problem was gone. This Issue is duplicate of #4695!

[iamnbutler]

Hmm, what buffer font have you set in your config? I managed to get very slow startup times with specific fonts in #4695

You're right! Just removed Iosevka from config and problem was gone. This Issue is duplicate of #4695!

I've said this in other places, but Iosevka is MASSIVE. Honestly, outside of something that is preloaded like it is in Zed I really wouldn't recommend using it without subsetting the font to something smaller... It has hundreds of thousands of character glyphs in it by default, resulting in truly a massive font size (go compare the font size of a single weight of Iosevka to almost any other font, its 10x+ larger 😬)

[jansol]

I've said this in other places, but Iosevka is MASSIVE.

I take it this refers specifically to it having way more control points per glyph than it needs rather than the number of glyphs? Since the problem does not occur with Arial Unicode MS (ships with macOS by default AFAIK).

[vizh]

It's interesting that I use this font everywhere, and I haven't noticed any software running slower with it. I can only assume that the font rendering or loading method using in Zed differs from the one used other software in MacOS. It would be odd to describe in the documentation for a programming editor which fonts are desirable or undesirable to use.

Thank you for the tip on trimming the font to only the used set of characters. I will give it a try as a temporary solution.

[iamnbutler]

It's interesting that I use this font everywhere, and I haven't noticed any software running slower with it. I can only assume that the font rendering or loading method using in Zed differs from the one used other software in MacOS. It would be odd to describe in the documentation for a programming editor which fonts are desirable or undesirable to use.

Thank you for the tip on trimming the font to only the used set of characters. I will give it a try as a temporary solution.

Yeah, on our side we will need to see what is causing this. It's been an ongoing issue, but oddly has only showed up with this font.