Investigating Emacs CPU Usage


I'm using emacs-eclim for programming Java. It gives me a lot of the goodness from Eclipse, including true auto completion and highlighting of warnings and errors in the buffer. However, I've found that sometimes it's close to unusuable because it consumes too much CPU and hangs for several seconds (~8 in my last case) before doing what I told it to.

Today, I thought I'd get to the bottom of this, and I ventured on my first adventure with the Emacs native profiler and it was surprisingly easy to use!

First, I started the profiler with M-x profiler-start, then I did what was the probblem in eclim, namely opening a Java file with lots of errors. Once it was done hogging my CPU (100% for 5-8 seconds, thank you very much), I asked the profiler to give me the function calls that were generating CPU load by issuing M-x profiler-report:

- command-execute                                                3122  84%
 - call-interactively                                            3122  84%
  - apply                                                        3122  84%
   - ad-Advice-call-interactively                                3122  84%
    - #<subr call-interactively>                                 3122  84%
     - Buffer-menu-this-window                                   2734  73%
      - switch-to-buffer                                         2734  73%
       - apply                                                   2734  73%
        - ad-Advice-switch-to-buffer                             2734  73%
         - eclim-problems-highlight                              2734  73%
          - remove-if-not                                        2701  73%
           - apply                                               2701  73%
            - cl-remove                                          2701  73%
             - apply                                             2697  72%
              - cl-delete                                        2693  72%
               - #<compiled 0x1586729>                           2693  72%
                - file-truename                                  2641  71%
                 - file-truename                                 2420  65%
                  - file-truename                                2295  62%
[..]

As you can see, it's the eclim-problems-highlight method which is the culprit and its call to file-truename. You can also see that there's some kind of looping going on from the #<compiled 0x1586729> as file-truename is constantly being called.

With that out of the way, I checkout the source code for emacs-eclim and localed the function eclim-problems-highlight. A quick git annotate later, I've found who made the change when and, most importantly, why the developer made it. I also asked Emacs to tell me what file-truename does with C-h f file-truename. So, it's code that's there to resolve any symlinks present in the path to the source code file we're looking at.

I now tried to remove the call to file-truename to see if it would improve performance. And what a difference it made! CPU usage went down to normaly levels, seldomly rising above 5% and Emacs managed to open Java files instantly without any lag or hang. Big success as far as I'm concerned :-)

I've made a fix to emacs-eclim, but I'm not sure if this is something the maintainers of emacs-eclim wants merged. Nevertheless, this was a great lesson for me on how to investigate performance issue in Emacs and I can now use Emacs/eclim for projects than before. Yeah!


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