Re: emacs takes exhorbitantly long to read long, one-line files.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Randy Yates <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 23:52:28 -0400
> 
> I have a file (a matlab .m file of a vector of data) that is all on
> one line and about 2 MB:
> 
>   http://www.digitalsignallabs.com/dspin.m
> 
> emacs takes a very long time (6 minutes?) to read this in, and
> practically becomes unusable in the mean time.

I think most of the time is taken by display, not by actually reading
the file.

> I'm thinking of looking into the code to get an idea of why this happens
> and of course look for a fix. If anyone has any pointers or other info
> on the problem, please inform me. 

It's a long known problem, whose reasons are closely related to the
implementation of the Emacs display engine.  See

  http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13675#8