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

[Tim Cross]

tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:

> You didn't say explicitly (I don't think), but you impleid that you're
> using Emacs 21.  21 is *much* *much* slower over a forwarded X11
> connection than 20.7 was.  I'm not sure what's in all the network
> traffic, but it generates a lot.  If I'm working over an ssh/X11 link,
> I never use 21.
> 
> The other problem you could be having is dropped packets.  ssh/X11
> connections in general seem to be really sensitive to dropped packets,
> and too many of them will cause the connection to just hang for a
> while.  Combined with Emacs 21's chattiness, this can be really
> unpleasant.
> 
> Finally, if the remote server is Linux 2.4, I'm sorry.  I've noticed
> that its scheduler isn't very nice to interactive applications over an
> ssh/X11 connection.  It seems to want to give them fewer timeslices of
> a longer duration than you'd want.  I have had a much better time with
> Solaris, or Linux 2.2.

While this may not solve the problem, it might improve performance if
you also use something like dxcp to get some additional compression of
X protocol packets. also, since you are doing X over an ssh
connection, try playing with the ssh compression levels. Also try
executing other X applications and see if they have the same
slowness. I would also turn off any "features" which you don't
need/use like the toolbar. Also, make sure the fonts you are using are
available on both machines - sometimes you can get really slow
performance if the remote font specified for emacs is not available
locally or is available, but mapping takes additional time
etc. Although it might sound crazy, it may also be worth doing some
traceroutes to check where the packets are going to get to your
system.

Good luck
T