Re: What's the problem?

[Miles Bader]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:
> If you profile Gnus with ELP, you see that the amount of time spent
> waiting for external processes like movemail is not the biggest cause
> of the lockups.  Most of it is spent evaluating elisp.  Even when
> getting new mail.

It depends on your environment of course -- if you have a slow network
connection (or a slow server), it can spend a _lot_ of time waiting for
external processes/data.

Personally I think making emacs generally multi-threaded is far more
trouble than it's worth, but in some cases like gnus, it would be worth
it to rewrite (small parts of) _that application_ to execute in the
background.  In my daily usage the main two places where I end up
waiting many minutes for emacs to finish something are (1) fetching my
daily mail into gnus via pop3.el, and (2) entering a newsgroup with many
unread messages on my home machine, which has a slow modem connection;
in both of these cases, the great majority of time is spent waiting for
data over the network.

Anyway my main point is that I think it's basically an application
issue, though emacs might help by adding helper functions.

-Miles
-- 
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly it flips over,
pinning you underneath.  At night the ice weasels come.  --Nietzsche