remote X11/GNU emacs/ssh: Incredible slowness loading libs

[David Abrahams]

I've been doing some work on remote machines on the other U.S. coast
recently, and have noticed strange and horrible delays associated with
running GNU emacs in an X window. At first I thought the problem was the
speed of traffic associated with X11, but I don't think so any more. The
reason I say these delays are strange is that they seem to be worst when
emacs is loading libraries (especially during startup), or just when it's
trying to respond to "C-x C-f" the first time. On some machines, it takes
literally minutes to give me the "find file:" prompt. I don't see the same
problems when running "emacs -nw" in an xterm (that just blasts along like
crazy), so it can't be having trouble loading the libraries. I don't see
anything this bad when running Xemacs, so I doubt there's a real problem
with the X11 GUI stuff. Can't imagine what the problem is. Any ideas?

TIA,
Dave Abrahams

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           David Abrahams * Boost Consulting
dave@boost-consulting.com * http://www.boost-consulting.com