Re: Accelerating Emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Herbert Euler" <herberteuler@hotmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 19:44:56 +0800
> 
> Also strange to me now. I tried that for more times, and sometimes
> Emacs is so slow that I'm tired and then typed C-g to abort the generating
> process, while it's OK in other trials. The job is half-finished when I
> interrupt it. The signal of taking long time is Emacs prints one of the
> messages listed above and stops there from continuing printing. If that
> happens, the only way seems to be press C-g to abort it.
> 
> Is it because of some bugs in garbage collection? I don't know how to find
> out what the problem is, so can't provide any constructive information.

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.

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.

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

  . 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.

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