Re: emacs trying to load too many files at startup

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

 > > From: Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden>
 > > Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 10:31:16 -0800
 > > 
 > > The /tmp/emacs.strace file shows that emacs is trying to load at
 > > startup a lot of files that are dumped anyway so there should be no
 > > reason to load them at startups. 
 > > 
 > > This is seen by looking at stat system calls like:
 > > 
stat64("/home/dann/packages/emacs-CVS/share/emacs/22.0.50/site-lisp/replace.elc", 
0xbf8c767c)
 > > 
 > > Other files loaded: abbrev, textmodes/fill, emacs-lisp/lisp-mode, etc, etc
 > > 
 > > There are about 2400 stat syscalls during the startup. 
 > > emacs-21.4 does about 230 stat64 syscalls... 
 > > 
 > > When running from the local disk this is unlikely to cause a problem,
 > > but it might be a problem when using a slow NFS server...
 > > 
 > > Does anyone know what is going on? 
 > 
 > The easiest and the most accurate way of answering that is to put a
 > breakpoint in stat64, and then do a bt each time the breakpoint
 > triggers.

stat64 is a syscall, so you cannot set a breakpoint on it. I set a
breakpoint on Fexpand_file_name instead and that lead to:

(gdb)  xbacktrace
"locate-file-internal"
"locate-file"
"mapcar"
"command-line"
"normal-top-level"


And that seems to indicate this code:

 ;; Convert preloaded file names to absolute.
 (setq load-history
        (mapcar (lambda (elt)
                  (if (and (stringp (car elt))
                           (not (file-name-absolute-p (car elt))))
                      (cons (locate-file (car elt) load-path
                                         load-suffixes)
                            (cdr elt))
                    elt))
                load-history))

This is the change that introduced the above code:

revision 1.381
date: 2005/10/21 17:20:45;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +11 -0
(command-line): Convert library names in `load-history' to absolute file names.

The question is: should anything be done about this? 
   
       --dan