kitty startup slow on my laptop

[AntonLydike]

I just switched to kitty on my main machine, and am now in the process of switching on my laptop. One thing I noticed immediately was how slow kitty started. I never noticed on my main machine and ran some benchmarks. Here are the results:

For this test I removed my kitty config, so this is using the default config.

My laptop is running NixOS 21.05, and kitty 0.20.3 created by Kovid Goyal.

The weird thing is, that my main machine has no problem starting kitty:

My main machine is also running nixos, but it's a little older. It uses kitty 0.18.3.

Does anyone have any idea?

[kovidgoyal]

Hard to say, use strace/gperf/some other profiling tool. Most likely it will be either GPU drivers or fontconfig causing the slowdown. Although if startup times are important to you I would suggest using --single-instance.