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

[imi.horvath@gmail.com]

On Monday, February 16, 2015 at 3:12:30 AM UTC+1, kgthegreat wrote:
> > 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 used to face this problem on MBP. Due to the following observations, I think this problem is related to memory consumption.
> 
> 1. Never happens after a restart, if emacs is the first app to run.
> 2. Almost always happens if emacs is run when MBP is up for a long time with lot of other apps.
> 3. Killing most apps especially chrome and then starting emacs = success.
> 
> Since then, I have upgraded the RAM from 2 + 2 config to 8 + 2 and have never faced this issue so far.

Yes, I agree. I've got a similar pattern here. When other apps and the caching of OS X uses up the physical memory (2+2 GB in my case) and I launch the Emacs.app, it happens most certainly.
I've got the feeling that it's a bug related to the interplay between the Cocoa Emacs.app startup code and the memory management in OS X...