"strace emacs" reveals emacs always active

"strace emacs" reveals emacs always active

[Dan Jacobson]

Comparing
$ strace emacs
vs.
$ strace vi
one finds emacs never sleeps. Lots of gettimeofday calls.
And I thought all it needed to do was keep count of auto-save-interval
events.  Yes, emacs isn't making a blip on my CPU meter, but still I
bet it is doing something that miserly me probably doesn't need it to do.

Re: "strace emacs" reveals emacs always active

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org>
> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:36:02 +0800
> 
> Comparing
> $ strace emacs
> vs.
> $ strace vi
> one finds emacs never sleeps. Lots of gettimeofday calls.

That's Emacs idle loop in action.  It's normal: how else would Emacs
know whether it has something to do?

In addition, depending on what you have in your .emacs init file, some
features, such as display-time, require more system calls inside the
idle loop.

> Yes, emacs isn't making a blip on my CPU meter

So what's your complaint?

> but still I
> bet it is doing something that miserly me probably doesn't need it to do.

Why do you need to assume that?  Why not assume that Emacs does only
what it needs to do, and nothing else?