[RP] speed issues

[Joe Corneli]

Caveat: I'll describe the problem, then describe some theories. The
theories may be totally bunk and (further) reveal my lack of
knowledge about how computers work.  I'll pose the theories as
questions so I might sound a little less dumb.

The problem.

I've sometimes noticed an easily discernable lag in response time
for newly-focused windows (full screen) to render or for the bar to
display a message.  Sometimes just the first line of text in e.g. an
rxvt or emacs window will appear, then the rest will fill in a bit
later.

Theory 1. (8 megabytes and constantly swapping.)

Could this be due to a memory leak in Emacs? 

(I was under the impression that Emacs was garbage collected and
that it wouldn't have memory leaks, but the behavior is somewhat
reminiscent of Netscape c. 1997, so I'm mentioning this idea.)  I've
been using the cedet/semantic/wisent package, and I feel I have no
guarantees that this thing is coded in a computer-friendly way.  I
also saw an ominous "Variable binding depth exceeds
max-specpdl-size" message from Emacs not long ago, thought maybe
this was relevant.

Theory 2. (got root?)

Could it be that the root keymap is being processed slower than the
top keymap?

I'm imagining right now that I haven't seen the problem when I'm
using the top keymap, but maybe I'm wrong.  I'm going to hang out
inside the top keymap for a while and see if I see the problem
again.  Will let you know.  

Maybe it has something to do with my xmodmaps too...?

Joe