Re: Accelerating Emacs?

["Herbert Euler" <herberteuler@hotmail.com>]

>From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
>To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>Subject: Re: Accelerating Emacs?
>Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 17:43:29 +0200

I'm sorry I was a bit busy yesterday.

The following description is based on my Emacs 21.3 in Windows.

>You can enable garbage-collect messages by setting the variable
>garbage-collection-messages to non-nil.  Then you will see a message
>in the echo area when Emacs is in GC.

I turned it on, and when Emacs hangs the two messages

    "Garbage collecting..."

and

    "???? (a long word I can't see it clearly) @code{print-elements-of-list} 
..."

are displayed alternately in the echo area. But I can only conclude
that the exchanging speed of displaying is slower and slower by time.
Task manager shows that Emacs uses about 80MB memory and
the number increases even if I abort the formatting process, although
the speed is becoming slow. A few seconds later, this number stops
increasing, but doesn't fall down as well. Emacs occupies 50% of
CPU cycle and this percentage is not changed during these periods.
C-x C-b shows no buffer contains further information about the details
of garbage collection. It seems that there is a died repetition
somewhere although I can't address it.

>Other things to consider include:
>
>   . Perhaps your system is running out of free RAM and Emacs starts
>     paging?  You can use the Windows Task Manager to see how much
>     physical memory is used, how many page faults Emacs generates, and
>     other pertinent info.

The bottom line of Task Manager contains a string like '362M / 1230M'.
The information about Emacs is

Name            User             CPU            Memory
emacs.exe      xuguanpeng        50          82,520K

I don't know what these mean exactly, but I'm sure the physical memory
is not used out.

>   . How many other programs are using up CPU cycles?  The Task Manager
>     will help you see that as well.

The total of CPU cycles used by other programs (except System Idle
Process) is about 10%.

>   . When Emacs freezes, do other programs on this system become
>     unresponsive as well, or do they work normally?  If the former,
>     perhaps some network-related problem ties up the system in a
>     busy-wait loop.

And I'm sure there is nothing wrong with network since I can open url
with Opera.

>   . Does Emacs run any subprocesses concurrently with
>     texinfo-format-buffer?  If so, perhaps it's one of those
>     subprocesses that causes Emacs to hang.

No, I ran only M-x texinfo-format-buffer in a fresh Emacs process.

I wonder if I can get the details about garbage collection so I can figure
out how much Emacs goes through at least.

Regards,
Guanpeng Xu

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