Thanks for the guidance. The profiler definitely cleared things up. The
pretty-print function was getting a really large structure, and all of the
time was being spent in calculating indentation. Thanks again.

Austin

On Sun Nov 16 2014 at 8:10:15 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
wrote:

> > Sorry, good point.  The emacs process maxes out one of my cores for a few
> > minutes.  During this time emacs seems unresponsive to input, though it
> does
> > redraw on the screen.
>
> You can try M-x profiler-start RET RET before and M-x profiler-report
> RET afterwards, which should tell you where time was spent.
>
> > Maybe the deep-seeming stack of Ffuncall/exec_byte_code/etc. is normal,
> but
> >  it was remarkable enough to me that I thought I'd mention it.
>
> Yes, it's perfectly normal.  If you think of how an interpreter works,
> the C-level backtrace will typically look like a (deep) nesting of calls
> between functions called "eval" or "apply" or "call".
>
> > What's the best way to get that? Bear in mind that, as far as I can tell,
> > emacs isn't responding to input when I see this problem. And since I
> don't
> > really know where this is happening in elisp-land, I'm not sure where to
> > add instrumentation or anything like that.
>
> You can try (setq debug-on-quit t) and hitting C-g.
> If that doesn't work, do a "kill -USR2 <emacspid>" which should also
> drop you into the debugger.
>
>
>         Stefan
>