Initializing font takes a long time

Question

Initializing font takes a long time. Here I am initializing the Arial font to be used later in the program:

pygame.font.SysFont("Arial", 30)

However this takes about 30 seconds to execute every time I start up the program. Is this supposed to happen?

I'm testing it on macOS Sierra.

Answer 1

Apparently the issue was caused by fc-cache in XQuartz not able to cache fonts properly (Bug 97546). After updating XQuartz from 2.7.10 to 2.7.11 the speed is back to normal.