Q2.1.22: SXEmacs seems to take a really long time to do some things

David Moore writes:

Two things you can do:

1) C level:

When you see it going mad like this, you might want to use gdb from an ’xterm’ to attach to the running process and get a stack trace. To do this just run:

gdb /path/to/sxemacs/sxemacs ####

Where #### is the process id of your sxemacs, instead of specifying the core. When gdb attaches, the sxemacs will stop [1] and you can type ‘where’ in gdb to get a stack trace as usual. To get things moving again, you can just type ‘quit’ in gdb. It’ll tell you the program is running and ask if you want to quit anyways. Say ’y’ and it’ll quit and have your emacs continue from where it was at.

2) Lisp level:

Turn on debug-on-quit early on. When you think things are going slow hit C-g and it may pop you in the debugger so you can see what routine is running. Press ‘c’ to get going again.

debug-on-quit doesn’t work if something’s turned on inhibit-quit or in some other strange cases.