Re: What's the problem?

[Simon Josefsson]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:
>> If you profile Gnus with ELP, you see that the amount of time spent
>> waiting for external processes like movemail is not the biggest cause
>> of the lockups.  Most of it is spent evaluating elisp.  Even when
>> getting new mail.
>
> It depends on your environment of course -- if you have a slow network
> connection (or a slow server), it can spend a _lot_ of time waiting for
> external processes/data.

Right, with emphasis on _can_.

> Personally I think making emacs generally multi-threaded is far more
> trouble than it's worth, but in some cases like gnus, it would be worth
> it to rewrite (small parts of) _that application_ to execute in the
> background.

For me, this wouldn't solve the problem (CPU bound summary
computations).  For you, on a slow connection, it would solve your
problem (IO bound network access).  There is nothing that says we
can't do both.  (Except that none of us appear to be doing anything
but talking... :-))

> Anyway my main point is that I think it's basically an application
> issue, though emacs might help by adding helper functions.

I don't see how fixing my perceived problem can be done without some
kind of threading support in Emacs (co-operative or whatever).  Hence,
helper functions would do more than just help, they are critical in
improving the application.