Re: Emacs Slowdown

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)
>> Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2015 11:48:47 +0000
>> 
>> I am suffering a rather disasterous slowdown in my emacs. It feels like
>> a memory leak, as my emacs gets slower over time. It mostly seems to be
>> affected auctex, where there is considerable lag in cursor movement to
>> the point that typing becomes difficult.
>
> For starters, customize garbage-collection-messages to a non-nil
> value, and see if Emacs announces GC while cursor movement is
> sluggish.


Ah, yes, forgotten that one.


> If you want to test the hypothesis of a memory leak, it's easier to
> look at your Emacs process's virtual memory size, either in 'top' or
> in "M-x proced".  Take a few snapshots of the value and try to
> correlate that with the values reported by 'garbage-collect'.  If
> those values stay approximately stable, or go down, but the VSS of the
> process goes up, you can suspect a memory leak; otherwise the problem
> is elsewhere.
>
> (Personally, I wouldn't pursue the memory leak avenue first,
> especially if this is an official release, not a development version
> of Emacs: I think other possible reasons are much more probable.  But
> that's me.)


I've been using both using both releases and development. I'd agree,
I've not found many memory leaks in my time.


>> which is an awful lot of functions to be called on every keypress. I
>> realise that I may have gone a bit overboard here, especially as five of
>> those functions are mine!
>
> The question is: what do those hook do, on average?  If they are very
> lightweight (profile them to see if they are), then this isn't your
> villain.
>
> Also, try removing most of the hooks when you see sluggish operation,
> and see if that brings any significant speedup; if not, these aren't
> what you are looking for.

Saw Stefan's post and think these are a red-herring also.

Phil