Re: The speed of Emacs 21

[Dave Love]

>>>>> "JW" == John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

 JW> Sometime in the last two weeks, it appears that e21's Lisp interpretor
 JW> (or something) has slowed down dramatically.

The usual test of the Lisp engine is byte-compiling simple.el.  Of
course that depends on the compiler not doing more work than in one
version than the other.

 JW>   Type `G c' in the Gnus *Group* buffer, to customize a group's
 JW>   parameters.  This takes 10 seconds on my 700 MHz machine, with
 JW>   nothing else running!

It's slow, but on a P100 it's at most twice as slow as that for me.  I
profiled either that or building a Custom buffer once and tried to
speed up the widget code but couldn't make much impression on it.

 JW> Anybody have any ideas on how I can begin to track this down?

Profiling, presumably with ELP initially, but you can turn on C-level
profiling, at least on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD; I don't recall the flag.
Turning on GC messages can be instructive, but you apparently already
have consing figures.

There are various debugging/checking flags that can be turned on which
will slow things down, but they're not by default as far as I know.
(I do have some of them on.)