Re: CVS Emacs on Windows XP takes 60 seconds to start

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Francis Litterio <flitterio@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:50:59 -0400
> 
> >   if (!(NILP (Vw32_get_true_file_attributes)
> > 	|| (EQ (Vw32_get_true_file_attributes, Qlocal)
> > 	    && devtype != DRIVE_FIXED && devtype != DRIVE_RAMDISK))
> >       /* No access rights required to get info.  */
> >       && (fh = CreateFile (name, 0, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING,
> > 			   FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS, NULL))
> >          != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
> >
> > to always evaluate to zero, thus bypassing the code in the block that
> > follows the `if' clause and calls get_file_owner_and_group.
> 
> Eli,
> 
> I changed the above condition to:
> 
>    if (0)
> 
> and rebuilt.  The resulting emacs.exe starts immediately (both "emacs
> -q" and "emacs -Q"), and there are no RPC calls made to any external
> host when Emacs is starting.

Thanks.  I have one more request, assuming you can run Emacs under a
debugger: with the above condition enabled (i.e. revert the code to
what it is in the CVS), can you please verify that lookup_account_sid
is called by `stat' exactly twice during startup: once for the user
who owns the Emacs installation tree (probably you), and one more time
for the primary group of that user.  The rest of files that `stat' is
called for should not cause a call to lookup_account_sid, but instead
should get their user and group name and ID from the cache maintained
by w32_add_to_cache and w32_cached_id.  I'd like to make sure that the
calls to lookup_account_sid are kept to their bare minimum, as
intended, and that there's no bug in the code which handles that part.

Beyond that, I intend to make changes in the code such that the file
security information is requested only when the caller of `stat'
really needs that.  The absolute majority of `stat' calls during
startup come from functions like `file-exists-p' and `load' (via
`openp') that only need to know if the file exists and is a
directory.  I want to modify code so that Emacs doesn't even try to
call lookup_account_sid on behalf of these callers.  This should bring
down the startup time even for situations such as yours, where a
firewall blocks access to LDAP.

Thanks for working on this.