Re: Hang on startup on OS X (GUI only)

[Guido Van Hoecke <guivho@gmail.com>]

Problem happens frequently on my Mac, using 'GNU Emacs 24.4.1
(x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0, NS apple-appkit-1265.21)
 of 2014-10-21 on builder10-9.porkrind.org' (also got it at
http://emacsformacosx.com/)

Utterly frustrated, I created a startup automator app called
killAndRestartTheGodOfEditors.app which runs following script:

sleep 60
pids=`/bin/ps -axo pid,command | grep [E]macs | awk '{ print $1 }' | tr
'\n' ' '`
if [ "no$pids" != "no" ]; then
    kill -KILL $pids
fi
/usr/bin/emacsApp &

So it basically waits a minute, kills emacs and starts it anew. This one
never hangs, go figure.

Note that /usr/bin/emacsApp just contains 'open -a Emacs.app'
I do not remember why I used (needed?) this intermediate step, but it is my
current setup.

It does not fix the problem, but by the time I've got the paper and my
first coffee, there's a responsive copy of Emacs...


Maybe it does help others to deal with the frustration of this problem.

Guido



On 15 February 2015 at 20:28, Elliott Slaughter <elliottslaughter@gmail.com>
wrote:

> (If there is a better place to direct this (e.g. a bug tracker) please let
> me know.)
>
> Emacs often hangs on startup on Mac OS X. The hangs are non-deterministic
> but frequent (25-50% of runs), consume 100% of CPU, and only happen when
> starting Emacs.app with the GUI enabled, never when running in text mode on
> the command-line. I have reproduced the hangs with an empty .emacs file and
> after having completely removed .emacs.d.
>
> I am using Emacs 24.4 from http://emacsformacosx.com/ , but notably, this
> bug has been reported multiple times by users of Homebrew (who either
> compile from source or download a binary from Homebrew's own servers):
> https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/36737
> https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/25003
>
> I have attached the start of a log from Mac OS X's built-in crash reporter.
> I can provide the rest of the report as well, if that would be helpful. (It
> contains various stack traces sampled from the unresponsive process.)
>
> Note that while the trace below says that I've installed Emacs from
> homebrew, this is the cask version, which is just a proxy for the
> emacsformacosx.com version, which is not the same as the Homebrew proper
> version (which was the focus of the bug reports above), which is compiled
> from source.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> ===========
>
> Date/Time:       2015-02-15 11:08:40 -0800
> OS Version:      10.10.2 (Build 14C109)
> Architecture:    x86_64
> Report Version:  21
>
> Command:         Emacs-x86_64-10_9
> Path:
> /opt/homebrew-cask/*/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs-x86_64-10_9
> Version:         ??? (???)
> Parent:          launchd [1]
> PID:             39366
>
> Event:           hang
> Duration:        4.00s (process was unresponsive for 176 seconds before
> sampling)
> Steps:           41 (100ms sampling interval)
>
> Hardware model:  MacBookPro8,2
> Active cpus:     8
>
> Fan speed:       4362 rpm
>
> [... file continues for about 1 MB of text ...]
>
> --
> Elliott Slaughter
>
> "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to
> predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
>