Emacs slow away from office

Emacs slow away from office

[Mark Carter]

I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same laptop,
and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
programs work normally, as expected.

What's going on?

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[jberdine]

Mark Carter <alt.mcarter@googlemail.com> writes:

> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
> office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
> When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same laptop,
> and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
> operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
> programs work normally, as expected.
>
> What's going on?

To add to this, I am experiencing what could be the same issue with
23.1.50.1 (running on Windows 7).  For me, the unresponsiveness seems to
be directly related to operations that involve the file system,
visiting, saving, etc.  When out of the office, if I disconnect from all
networks, the delays disappear.

Cheers,  Josh

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Mark Carter]

On 4 Feb, 11:57, Mark Carter <alt.mcar...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1.

On Windows XP, BTW.

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Tim X]

Mark Carter <alt.mcarter@googlemail.com> writes:

> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
> office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
> When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same laptop,
> and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
> operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
> programs work normally, as expected.
>
> What's going on?

My first guess would be DNS or network related problems. In the past,
there have been reports of emacs becoming slow when the network wasn't
configured correctly. I would verify that when not connected to your
office network you can

1. Do DNS lookups OK and without delay.
2. That 'localhost' is correctly configured and resolves correctly. 
3. Check for valid resolv.conf
4. check validity of /etc/hosts

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Tyler Smith]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:

> Mark Carter <alt.mcarter@googlemail.com> writes:
>
>> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
>> office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
>> When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same
>> laptop, and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
>> operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
>> programs work normally, as expected.
>>
>> What's going on?
>
> My first guess would be DNS or network related problems. In the past,
> there have been reports of emacs becoming slow when the network wasn't
> configured correctly. 

Out of curiosity, why would Emacs need to access the network during
general use, excepting the obvious cases of gnus and mail reading?

Thanks,

Tyler

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Tim X]

Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@eku.edu> writes:

> Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:
>
>> Mark Carter <alt.mcarter@googlemail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
>>> office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
>>> When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same
>>> laptop, and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
>>> operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
>>> programs work normally, as expected.
>>>
>>> What's going on?
>>
>> My first guess would be DNS or network related problems. In the past,
>> there have been reports of emacs becoming slow when the network wasn't
>> configured correctly. 

Without going through the code, I couldn't say. However, at a guess, it
probably depends a lot on how someone has their emacs configured and
what packages are loaded etc. Things which could be relevant include 

* SMTP server settings. Maybe emacs verifies server access when it
  starts?
* Tramp. I know for example that running ido-mode also loads tramp
  even if you don't visit a remote file system
* Emacs probably needs networking configured correctly to determine its
  hostname and to handle things like emacs server and daemon mode etc
* Many emacs packages and add ons rely on network services. Depending on
  when/how they are loaded could impact on what emacs is doing. 

Note that the FAQ and/or PROBLEMS file has an item regarding slow
startup etc which is due to misconfigured network settings and that this
is relevant even if the computer is not on a network.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Tyler Smith]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:

>
> Without going through the code, I couldn't say. However, at a guess, it
> probably depends a lot on how someone has their emacs configured and
> what packages are loaded etc. Things which could be relevant include 
>

Thanks, Tim!

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Matthew L Daniel]

On 2:59 PM, Mark Carter wrote:
> I have a works laptop containing GNU emacs 23.1.1. When I am at the
> office, connected to our office network, emacs works at normal speed.
> When I am at home, emacs takes a long time to load on the same laptop,
> and is often generally unresponsive, with long pauses in its
> operation. This happens consistently on every occasion. All my other
> programs work normally, as expected.
>
> What's going on?
>

While you didn't mention what host OS you were using, it smells like a 
recent win32 problem I experienced.

This is the solution that Jason Rumney proposed, and it seems to have 
made a major improvement for me:

;;; From: Jason Rumney <jasonrumney@gmail.com>
;;; To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
;;; Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:15:12 -0800 (PST)
;;; Subject: Re: occasional pause (or stutter) on win32 emacs 23.0.95
(setq w32-get-true-file-attributes nil)

If you want to read up on it, search the archives for "stutter".

   -- /v\atthew

Re: Emacs slow away from office

[Mark Carter]

On 5 Feb, 19:52, Matthew L Daniel <mdan...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (setq w32-get-true-file-attributes nil)

Seems to have done the trick. Many thanks.