Re: emacs trying to load too many files at startup

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>
> Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 11:49:57 -0800
> 
>   > 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.

Of course you can put a breakpoint on stat64, since it's a normal
function that issues a syscall, not the syscall itself.  If you tried
and failed, it's probably because glibc plays all kinds of redirection
and weak-alias games.  Try "rbreak stat64", and you will see the name
of the _real_ function that issues the syscall.  But that's an aside,
it sounds like you found the culprit.

> 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))

Do we know that this code alone is responsible for those 2000 extra
calls to stat64?  Is it possible that there's some other code besides
Fexpand_file_name that causes some of those calls?

> 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? 

I don't know.  Anyone?

I'm guessing that this is converting non-absolute file names in
loaddefs.el into absolute file names.