matplotlib taking time when being imported

Question

I just upgraded to the latest stable release of matplotlib (1.5.1) and everytime I import matplotlib I get this message:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/font_manager.py:273: UserWarning: Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.   warnings.warn('Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.') 

... which always stalls for a few seconds.

Is this the expected behaviour? Was it the same also before, but just without the printed message?

Answer 1

As tom suggested in the comment above, deleting the files:

fontList.cache fontList.py3k.cache  tex.cache  

solve the problem. In my case the files were under:

`~/.matplotlib` 

EDITED

A couple of days ago the message appeared again, I deleted the files in the locations mention above without any success. I found that as suggested here by T Mudau there's an extra location with text cache files is: ~/.cache/fontconfig

Answer 2

Confirmed Hugo's approach works for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS/matplotlib 1.5.1:

• deleted ~/.cache/matplotlib/fontList.cache
• ran code, again the warning was issued (assumption: is rebuilding the cache correctly)
• ran code again, no more warning (finally)