Re: remote X11/GNU emacs/ssh: Incredible slowness loading libs

[tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick)]

"David Abrahams" <david.abrahams@rcn.com> writes:

> "David Kastrup" <David.Kastrup@t-online.de> wrote in message
> news:x58z1j8wym.fsf@tupik.goethe.zz...
> 
> > > I'm sure it doesn't.
> >
> > If you know what the problem is, why do you ask?
> 
> I don't know what the problem is, but I have a strong suspicion what it
> isn't... and tests confirm that turning font-lock off makes no difference. I
> appreciate the suggestions, but everybody's looking under the streetlamp for
> my keys because that's where the light is, despite the fact that I lost them
> half a block away. Can anybody think of an explanation which doesn't have to
> do with the speed of graphics? The bottleneck appears to be some kind of
> network handshake between my machine and the remote one.

You didn't say explicitly (I don't think), but you impleid that you're
using Emacs 21.  21 is *much* *much* slower over a forwarded X11
connection than 20.7 was.  I'm not sure what's in all the network
traffic, but it generates a lot.  If I'm working over an ssh/X11 link,
I never use 21.

The other problem you could be having is dropped packets.  ssh/X11
connections in general seem to be really sensitive to dropped packets,
and too many of them will cause the connection to just hang for a
while.  Combined with Emacs 21's chattiness, this can be really
unpleasant.

Finally, if the remote server is Linux 2.4, I'm sorry.  I've noticed
that its scheduler isn't very nice to interactive applications over an
ssh/X11 connection.  It seems to want to give them fewer timeslices of
a longer duration than you'd want.  I have had a much better time with
Solaris, or Linux 2.2.

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