This occurs only on a SuSE 9.3 system, and reproducible from tiger onwards. A simple awt testcase takes a very long time (15 sec) to load. The Frame is displayed but some of the components are not rendered and the components visible are not responding to user actions. On the Frame, I've a canvas where I'm drawing a string using Helvetica font. If I comment out the code which sets the font, the app launches quickly. The testcase attached.

The thread dump (attached) shows that the getFontPath method takes a long time to complete. I've tried out the instructions listed in the evaluation of bug 4943191.

uname -a:
Linux jlab412 2.6.11.4-20a-default #1 Wed Mar 23 21:52:37 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

ls -l /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Sep 1 2005 /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so -> libfontconfig.so.1.0.4

/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.6 does not exist

ls -lL /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 184116 Mar 20 00:43 /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so

Output of sum:
14310 180

Tried fc-list, fc-cache and reran the test, but it is still taking time to load.

Outputs of strace command attached. strace1 is the log before running fc-list and fc-cache; strace2 after running the commands.