Re: Gnu Emacs way slower than XEmacs

[Simon Josefsson]

David Abrahams <address@hidden> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>>>>>>> "David" == David Abrahams <address@hidden> writes:
>>>
>>>     David> P.S. If it's any consolation, GNU Emacs is *WAY* faster
>>>     David> than XEmacs at sending mail to the SMTP server ;-)
>>>
>>> Right.  That's because traditionally we assumed that sendmail always
>>> worked and used an asynchronous process.  Then we started having
>>> people use less reliable software (eg, beta versions of TMDA) and
>>> losing mail.  So now we wait on the return code.  Perhaps this could
>>> be tweaked a bit, or made user-configurable, but we were in a hurry to
>>> get it right at the time; losing mail is a no-no.
>>
>> It's not clear if "sending mail" means sendmail or smtpmail --
>> David?
>
> I'm using smtpmail.

Then it doesn't use sendmail at all.  But it is weird -- smtpmail uses
network communication, just like imap.el.  One would think that if one
of the packages were fast, the other would too, instead of them being
negatively correlated.

IIRC smtpmail.el sends its output line-by-line whereas imap.el sends
as large chunks as possible.  Imap.el uses a process filter though,
which smtpmail.el doesn't.

Instead of speculating more, I'll leave it to someone who can debug
this further (I think a Windows machine is required for that...).