If anything, auto-revert-avoid-polling makes responsiveness worse -- the
window locked up a few times on me while doing ctrl-N while running a
CPU-intensive (and possibly IO-intensive) compilation.
Although I might not have set the value correctly ... I did M-x
customise-variable RET auto-revert-avoid-polling RET then "toggle" then
"apply".
.

On Sun, 5 Jan 2020 at 11:57, Mattias Engdegård <mattiase@acm.org> wrote:

> 5 jan. 2020 kl. 20.31 skrev Peter Ludemann <peter.ludemann@gmail.com>:
>
> > Which version of Emacs would you like me to try this with? And what
> result are you expecting/hoping to see? (e.g., might it reduce the current
> 30-80% CPU load for polling with emacs 28.0.50?) There are only a few open
> files directly under /tmp, so would this have any effect or does it
> propagate down to subdirectories?
> >
> > [Also, I'd need a few more details (not being an emacs-internals person)
> ... should I add this to my .emacs and restart, or execute in a scratch
> buffer, or ...?]
>
> 'auto-revert-avoid-polling' is a single global customisable variable, so
> you would set it using
>
>  M-x customise-variable RET auto-revert-avoid-polling RET
>
> , then turn it on and apply the change. I believe it was introduced in
> Emacs 27.
>
> The idea is to save CPU by not having to look at files periodically to see
> if they have changed. I have no idea if you would see any improvement at
> all, but it shouldn't make anything worse.
>
>