Re: slow startup of tramp

[Daniel Pittman]

On 25 Sep 2004, Julien Oster wrote:
> I learned to love tramp, the package where I can remotely edit files
> via a shell interface, through ssh or even su.
>
> However, when opening the first file on a remote host (or just trying
> to do TAB completion to find the file), tramp takes a long time to
> start up. During the startup, all sorts of information which tramp
> gathered about the shell is displayed.

[...]

> So why does tramp take such a long time to start up remote
> connections? 

I have not looked at the code recently, but when I worked on it there
were two reasons:

1. We needed to know a *lot* about the environment at the far end, and
   could assume *nothing* about it.

2. We did all the testing synchronously.

> It even does this when I use "/su::/" which works locally
> on my fast machine and doesn't use network at all!
>
> Is there anything I can do to make it fire connections faster? 

Not really, I fear, without getting down into the TRAMP code itself.

You could rewrite the testing routines to do the majority of the work on
the remote side of the connection, or consider some sort of Perl-based
"server" mode that could be sent if a remote Perl instance could be
discovered.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception,
is composed of others.
        -- John Andrew Holmes