Re: tlug: Emacs these days

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Peter Linsley <plinsley@example.com> wrote,

> Hello All,
> 
> Am I the only one who finds that GNU Emacs 20.3.1 is just
> too heavy for everyday usage on your standard 166MHz/32MB 
> AT compatible? 
> 
> I am one of those people who is at a loss without Emacs 
> but wanted some of the newer features in GNU Emacs that
> the good old MULE was not keeping up with; XEmacs was 
> just way too slow. Hence the migration from MULE.
> 
> Any tips for improving on performance? I often find myself
> sitting waiting for Emacs to finish it's garbage collection
> or whatever before it will even consider to process my 
> keystrokes.

Probably it is the memory.  What else are you running?  The
X server can eat quite some memory and then there is of
course our favorite Web browser (probably the most buggy
memory sink on this planet after the OS from Redmond).  Try
running `top' and see how much memory X, Emacs, and Netscape 
is taking and how much of that is resident (the RSS field).
Chances are high that part of the memory that Emacs wants to 
garbage collect (GC) are swapped out and then GC takes a
long time.

XEmacs on a 133Mhz/64MB system is defintely running very
well (so it can't be the speed) - XEmacs usually takes more
memory than Emacs.

And then, if you are a mode junky like me (running
font-lock, fill-adapt, and auc-tex at once in a buffer),
you'll probably like

  (setq gc-cons-threshold 2000000)

in your `.emacs'.  Otherwise, Emacs may do a GC every ten
key strokes and that definitely is annoying.

Manuel

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Nomikai: 14 January 1999, 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
*** it will will be Jan 14 (Thu), as Jan 15 (Fri) is a natl holiday
Next Technical Meeting: Feb 13 (Sat), 12:30    ace: Temple Univ.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://tlug.linux.or.jp                     Sponsor: PHT