Re: It's almost 2016 and when (single-threaded) Emacs hangs, you gotta be smashing your keyboard!

[Alexander Shukaev]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 9:46 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 21:29:04 +0100
>> From: Alexander Shukaev <haroogan@gmail.com>
>>
>> This discussion might be with some rant flavor, and I apologize for
>> that beforehand.  Currently, I have to work with directories mounted
>> from network.  As a result, Dired either opens them slowly or hangs
>> forever (looks like a bug and/or glitch).  I personally find this very
>> frustrating, especially when I'm in the middle of work with 50+
>> buffers open (some of which are still in modified state).  The only
>> way to recover from such problems is to kill the Emacs process.
>
> You are on Windows, right?

In this particular case, I'm talking about Linux and directories
mounted from network.

>> how can so advanced text editor with ~30 year history be so unreliable
>> and fragile to work with in randomly occurring cases?
>
> FWIW, it isn't unreliable or fragile for me.  It is rather rock-solid,
> my sessions are usually open for many weeks on end, and almost never
> crash or hang.

Exactly, "almost never", but hangs DO happen.

>> It may freeze or it may not freeze, but if it does, all of the
>> unsaved work is lost, not to mention the fact that all of the layout
>> of windows and open buffers are lost as well.
>
> Neither of this is true.  When Emacs hits a fatal error, it
> auto-saves, and if you activate the desktop-saving feature, it will
> save a snapshot of your window and frame configuration fairly
> frequently, so starting a new session recreates at least those buffers
> which were visiting files or directories.

Could you please provide concrete settings for this?  Also, maybe it
does save on fatal error, but you have no chance of saving upon
killing the Emacs process due to dead hang.

>> First of all, I just want to once again draw your attention to one
>> of the urgent issues (to this date) of Emacs.
>
> Which urgent issue is that?

The one described above: dead handing.

>> And, secondly, I want to ask whether there exists a way to solve the
>> problem described above without multi-threading?
>
> On Posix systems, Emacs does use a kind of multi-threading: it invokes
> the 'ls' command to generate the directory listing.  You can configure
> Emacs on Windows to do the same, if you can get your hands on a decent
> port of GNU 'ls'.
>

I'm using 'ls' on both Linux and Windows and this does not prevent the
occasional hang on network directories.