Re: emacs trying to load too many files at startup

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

  > > From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>
  > > Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 10:31:16 -0800
  > > 
  > > The /tmp/emacs.strace file shows that emacs is trying to load at
  > > startup a lot of files that are dumped anyway so there should be no
  > > reason to load them at startups. 
  > > 
  > > This is seen by looking at stat system calls like:
  > > stat64("/home/dann/packages/emacs-CVS/share/emacs/22.0.50/site-lisp/replace.elc", 0xbf8c767c)
  > > 
  > > Other files loaded: abbrev, textmodes/fill, emacs-lisp/lisp-mode, etc, etc
  > > 
  > > There are about 2400 stat syscalls during the startup. 
  > > emacs-21.4 does about 230 stat64 syscalls... 
  > > 
  > > When running from the local disk this is unlikely to cause a problem,
  > > but it might be a problem when using a slow NFS server...
  > > 
  > > Does anyone know what is going on? 
  > 
  > The easiest and the most accurate way of answering that is to put a
  > breakpoint in stat64, and then do a bt each time the breakpoint
  > triggers.

stat64 is a syscall, so you cannot set a breakpoint on it. I set a
breakpoint on Fexpand_file_name instead and that lead to:

(gdb)  xbacktrace
"locate-file-internal"
"locate-file"
"mapcar"
"command-line"
"normal-top-level"


And that seems to indicate this code:

  ;; Convert preloaded file names to absolute.
  (setq load-history
	(mapcar (lambda (elt)
		  (if (and (stringp (car elt))
			   (not (file-name-absolute-p (car elt))))
		      (cons (locate-file (car elt) load-path
					 load-suffixes)
			    (cdr elt))
		    elt))
		load-history))

This is the change that introduced the above code:

revision 1.381
date: 2005/10/21 17:20:45;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +11 -0
(command-line): Convert library names in `load-history' to absolute file names.

The question is: should anything be done about this? 
    
        --dan