Comment # 1 on bug 1014114 from L. A. Walsh

FWIW, this takes a large # of fonts in /usr/share/fonts to reproduce.

Many fonts have more than one entry due to different names being used on
different systems.  It's also the case that openSuSE has added over 8000
entries to the font dir in the form of "symlinks".  I don't know how fc-cache
handles those, but if it handles them like hardlinks, it may treat them as an
additional 8000 fonts to recompute its "cache" [sic].

There are 44250 total entries under /usr/share/fonts, with 36119 "uniq" paths
before running a dup-check taking 19GB of space.  Of the 37119, it found 
that 20,346 were uniq files which only take 7.6GB of space.

Lots of things create duplicate files, including different naming conventions
on Windows and on linux -- and maybe an additional 8000 by opensuse.

If the fonts cache was amenable to a parallel algorithm, it could run as
much as 11-12X faster on my linux box.

Maybe if the fc-cache were only run once/day it might help?  That and maybe
send a message to the rpm-installer/deinstaller login that the cache needed to
be
regenerated due to fonts being added (or subtracted)?

This has been a problem for a few releases and seems to only get worse as more
fonts come out.  :-(