Re: RMAIL slows

[Richard Stallman]

    Deletion in RMAIL slows after an instance of GNU Emacs has been
    running for several days.  The time to delete the same 50 messages,
    all marked with `d', is double in the five day older instance than in
    the newer instance.

You said "deletion", but do you really mean "expunging"?
It looks that way.

The info you got with the profiler doesn't tell us much.  What you
need to do is find out where in the code the slowness is occurring.

Since rmail-summary-goto-msg contains no loops, if it gets slower
the slowness must be in a subroutine.  Since you did not see it in ELP,
it must be within a primitive written in C.

You could try running under GDB, doing the slow operation, and
stopping it with C-z to make a backtrace.  If you set up a loop to
call some summary command over and over, you will be able to type C-z
and make a backtrace as much as you like.  After you do it a few
times, you should see a pattern.

    Here is the backtrace for the older instance.  In both instances, I
    went to the most recent message, # 247, then to the previous message,
    then to the next (i.e., most recent message) again, then suspended the
    instance and ran `bt'.

Since you made that backtrace when Emacs was waiting, not during the
operation in question, it tells nothing relevant to the issue.