Re: Long pauses when opening files and other operations with emacs 23. and windows 7

[Keith S.]

On Jun 16, 7:30 pm, Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> > I could definitely use some advice on this.
>
> When something doesn't work right after an upgrade, a good piece of
> advice is to file a bug-report about it.
> In the case of Emacs, you do that with M-x report-emacs-bug RET
>
>         Stefan

I think it's a little too premature to file a bug. No bug is going to
get worked on if it isn't reproducible, and it's pointless to file
something until I can narrow down the scope of the potential problem.

Many other people have reported this issue, and several folks have
offered advice. For instance, setting w32-get-true-file-attributes was
certainly helpful for most of the slowdowns -- that wasn't a bug, but
a change that was documented in a very old changelog. And one that
most users, including myself, wouldn't have thought to connect with
this problem.

Right now, I think I MAY have further narrowed down the hanging
problems with opening files thanks to a clue from this blog post:
http://blog.zzamboni.org/solving-hangs-in-emacs-on-windows .

It looks like turning off font-lock-mode globally appears to have
helped. However, I've only been testing for about an hour, so it's
still a little early to say. I /do/ recall reading that emacs 23 on
Windows does some different things with fonts now, so it could simply
have something to do with that -- like the fact that I have a
surprising 323 (?!) fonts installed on this machine. Unfortunately,
Google hasn't yielded any other matches associating these slowdowns
with fonts. But if I conclude somewhat definitively that font-lock-
mode is the culprit, I may log a bug.

I upgraded to emacs 23 on another WinXP machine, and have NOT seen the
problems there. There are a handful of other differences between the
two machines that could affect file operations -- large number of
fonts, different A/V software, presence of network drives, offline
domain server vs. standalone workgroup, etc. -- so I'm still doing
process of elimination, and looking to get whatever feedback I can
from other users on the environments where they are experiencing this.

Keith