Re: Speed difference in Gnus

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

On Thu, Oct 13 2005, Hrvoje Niksic wrote:

> The speed difference between XEmacs and GNU Emacs is amazing, in that
> GNU Emacs is significantly faster, at least for "heavy" usage such as
> Gnus.

Interesting.  Which versions of (X)Emacs and Gnus did you test?

> Entering a large summary buffer takes time proportional to the
> *square* of the number of messages in the folder.  (This is not a
> wild guess, a friend has actually measured.)  Time to enter a folder
> of more than 3000 articles quickly degrades to minutes.
>
> For the longest time I believed this to be a result of XEmacs's
> implementation of text properties on top of extents.  I planned to
> convert Gnus to use extents natively, in the hope that it would speed
> up summary buffer generation.  

Then `M-RET' should be significantly faster, shouldn't it?

,----[ <f1> f gnus-group-quick-select-group RET ]
| gnus-group-quick-select-group is an interactive compiled Lisp
| function in `gnus-group.el'.
| (gnus-group-quick-select-group &optional ALL)
| 
| Select the current group "quickly".
| This means that no highlighting or scoring will be performed.
| If ALL (the prefix argument) is 0, don't even generate the summary
| buffer.
| 
| This might be useful if you want to toggle threading
| before entering the group.
`----

> But according to profiling, most of the time is spent in `insert',
> at least once you discount excessive GC by increasing
> gc-cons-theshold.  I'm not sure what XEmacs is doing wrong here.  I
> suspect Mule is to blame, but I can't prove it.

`C-u 0 M-RET' probably doesn't use insert so often.  Is it comparable
to `C-u 0 M-RET' in Emacs then?

> Using FSF Emacs gave me an order-of-magnitude speedup when entering
> large newsgroups and large mailing list folders.  It's uncanny.

Bye, Reiner.

PS: Cc-ing ding.  This might be interesting for Gnus developers.  See
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.xemacs.beta/20690 for the
    whole thread.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
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