Emacs slow away from home

Emacs slow away from home

[Ron House]

I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I 
have just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it 
takes something like 2 minutes or more to start up.

At home it is a second or two.

I can only think that this is somehow related to being out of range of 
our home network. Since I only use emacs to edit files, I can do without 
whatever internet services it is trying to access.

Can anyone suggest how to fix this problem?

In case it is relevant, here is what emacs says about itself:

GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
  of 2008-11-10 on raven, modified by Debian

This is running under debian etch.

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Ron House
Building Peace: http://peacelegacy.org
Australian Birds: http://wingedhearts.org
Principle of Goodness academic site: http://principleofgoodness.net

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Daniel Pittman]

Ron House <rhouse@smartchat.net.au> writes:

> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I have
> just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it takes something
> like 2 minutes or more to start up.  At home it is a second or two.

DNS on your laptop is broken: Emacs is trying to resolve something, probably
the FQDN to an address, or the address to an FQDN, that takes that long to
time-out.

This would be equally true of any other service that tried the same
translation, but you don't notice because little other desktop class software
does perform that check.

At a guess.
          Daniel

-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel@rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
               ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Jason Rumney]

On Aug 24, 12:07 pm, Ron House <rho...@smartchat.net.au> wrote:
> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I
> have just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it
> takes something like 2 minutes or more to start up.
>
> At home it is a second or two.
>
> I can only think that this is somehow related to being out of range of
> our home network. Since I only use emacs to edit files, I can do without
> whatever internet services it is trying to access.
>
> Can anyone suggest how to fix this problem?

From etc/PROBLEMS:

*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is
slow.

This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
full qualified domain name, FQDN.  You should have your FQDN in the
/etc/hosts file, something like this:

127.0.0.1	localhost
129.187.137.82	nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de	nuc04

The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Ron House]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 623 bytes --]

On 24/08/10 18:20, Aidan Gauland wrote:
> Ron House wrote:
>> Can anyone suggest how to fix this problem?
>>
>> In case it is relevant, here is what emacs says about itself:
>>
>> GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
>>   of 2008-11-10 on raven, modified by Debian
>
> What's most relevant the contents of your .emacs file.  Can you please post
> that for us (preferably compressed)?
>
> --Aidan

Thanks Aidan, file is attached.

-- 
Ron House
Building Peace: http://peacelegacy.org
Australian Birds: http://wingedhearts.org
Principle of Goodness academic site: http://principleofgoodness.net

[-- Attachment #2: dotemacs.gz --]
[-- Type: application/x-gzip, Size: 1764 bytes --]

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Ron House]

On 24/08/10 18:03, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> Ron House<rhouse@smartchat.net.au>  writes:
>
>> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I have
>> just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it takes something
>> like 2 minutes or more to start up.  At home it is a second or two.
>
> DNS on your laptop is broken: Emacs is trying to resolve something, probably
> the FQDN to an address, or the address to an FQDN, that takes that long to
> time-out.

Thanks Daniel, I know stuff will break when I go outside the limits of 
the LAN, but as I said, all I use emacs for is to edit files. My problem 
is, how do I turn off whatever it is trying to do (since I won't be 
needing the results of its doings anyway)? As it happens, I was trying 
to edit the files to get the network going elsewhere, and the 2 minute 
delay each time was really funny, in an annoying fashion.

-- 
Ron House
Building Peace: http://peacelegacy.org
Australian Birds: http://wingedhearts.org
Principle of Goodness academic site: http://principleofgoodness.net

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Daniel Pittman]

Ron House <rhouse@smartchat.net.au> writes:
> On 24/08/10 18:03, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Ron House<rhouse@smartchat.net.au>  writes:
>>
>>> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I have
>>> just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it takes something
>>> like 2 minutes or more to start up.  At home it is a second or two.
>>
>> DNS on your laptop is broken: Emacs is trying to resolve something, probably
>> the FQDN to an address, or the address to an FQDN, that takes that long to
>> time-out.
>
> Thanks Daniel, I know stuff will break when I go outside the limits of the
> LAN, but as I said, all I use emacs for is to edit files.

Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear: this does not *have* to break when you are outside
your LAN.  My laptop doesn't, for example, which is good.

> My problem is, how do I turn off whatever it is trying to do (since I won't
> be needing the results of its doings anyway)?

Some of these things happen inside glibc, I am afraid, so the answer is
typically "with difficulty".  I don't know specifically what in Emacs is
triggering the behaviour, though.

I would suggest ensuring that your host has an entry in /etc/hosts for the
hostname you use, though, which should reduce the problem.  Alternately, you
could tune down the DNS lookup time.

> As it happens, I was trying to edit the files to get the network going
> elsewhere, and the 2 minute delay each time was really funny, in an annoying
> fashion.

All die.  Oh, the embarrassment. ;)

        Daniel
-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel@rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
               ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[rustom]

On Aug 24, 5:36 pm, Daniel Pittman <dan...@rimspace.net> wrote:
> Ron House <rho...@smartchat.net.au> writes:
> > On 24/08/10 18:03, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> >> Ron House<rho...@smartchat.net.au>  writes:
:
:
>
> I would suggest ensuring that your host has an entry in /etc/hosts for the
> hostname you use, though, which should reduce the problem.  Alternately, you
> could tune down the DNS lookup time.

I remember (some 7-10 years ago) that emacs would simply not start
with a broken network setup
I dont remember what the correction was (something to do with hosts)
but what I do remember was something like this:
emacs would refuse to start if the ethernet cable was unplugged.

And I was (more or less as you describe): What the hell does emacs
have to do with the net side of things?!

>
> > As it happens, I was trying to edit the files to get the network going
> > elsewhere, and the 2 minute delay each time was really funny, in an annoying
> > fashion.
>
> All die.  Oh, the embarrassment. ;)

Sometimes you need vi's help to use emacs <<Duck>>

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[David Kastrup]

Ron House <rhouse@smartchat.net.au> writes:

> On 24/08/10 18:03, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Ron House<rhouse@smartchat.net.au>  writes:
>>
>>> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I have
>>> just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it takes something
>>> like 2 minutes or more to start up.  At home it is a second or two.
>>
>> DNS on your laptop is broken: Emacs is trying to resolve something, probably
>> the FQDN to an address, or the address to an FQDN, that takes that long to
>> time-out.
>
> Thanks Daniel, I know stuff will break when I go outside the limits of
> the LAN, but as I said, all I use emacs for is to edit files. My
> problem is, how do I turn off whatever it is trying to do (since I
> won't be needing the results of its doings anyway)?

It needs a unique system name to do proper file locking when editing
possibly networked files, and to be able to reliably work with
emacsclient.  That's well within the "all I use emacs for is to edit
files" department.

-- 
David Kastrup

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Ron,

>>>>> On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:07:07 +1000, Ron House ("RH") wrote:

  RH> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but I 
  RH> have just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it 
  RH> takes something like 2 minutes or more to start up.

  RH> At home it is a second or two.

  RH> I can only think that this is somehow related to being out of range of 
  RH> our home network. Since I only use emacs to edit files, I can do without 
  RH> whatever internet services it is trying to access.

  RH> Can anyone suggest how to fix this problem?

  RH> In case it is relevant, here is what emacs says about itself:

  RH> GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
  RH>   of 2008-11-10 on raven, modified by Debian

Hmmm, possibly *some* package is doing some lookup on the network. A good to
start to identify this package is to check what it's trying to connect to.

Maybe you can try to start emacs using 'strace', and see what it's waiting
for?

What happens if you bring down the network interface?

Good luck,
Dirk.

-- 
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema                  Helsinki, Finland
e:djcb@djcbsoftware.nl           w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
pgp: D09C E664 897D 7D39 5047 A178 E96A C7A1 017D DA3C

Re: Emacs slow away from home

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>:

> Ron House <rhouse@smartchat.net.au> writes:

>> I have been using emacs on my laptop under linux for a long time, but
>> I have just noticed that if I open emacs when I am away from home, it
>> takes something like 2 minutes or more to start up.  At home it is a
>> second or two.

> DNS on your laptop is broken: Emacs is trying to resolve something,
> probably the FQDN to an address, or the address to an FQDN, that takes
> that long to time-out.

Actually I think what it tries to do, is to find the FQDN of the machine
it's running on.

	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=216311
	http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/browse_thread/thread/783fe03168a5c168/640f9279be617a10

The workaround, according to the above URLs), is to put the FQDN of the
laptop into its hosts-file.

(I haven't tried this for myself)