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I have compiled Emacs pretest 24.3.93.1 from source and it runs fine most of the time. However, if I close Emacs after some time and then try to start it again, it just shows an unresponsive, blank white window and I have to wait more than 15 minutes for it to become responsive. While waiting, I am sure that my init files are not being run. I also tried running 'emacs -Q' with similar results.

Moreover, I tried 'emacs -Q -nw' and I just got a blank unresponsive terminal. Again, I had to wait quite some time for emacs to become responsive again. Any idea how I can troubleshoot this problem?

Edit: For compiling, I just downloaded the source and ran 'configure' and 'make' with no arguments. I use Ubuntu 14.04.

Tohiko
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2 Answers2

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Run strace emacs -Q and see what it is doing when it is hanging.

A typical problem that looks like this would be that Emacs is trying to resolve the local host name, and due to some config error this request to the name server times out. If this sounds plausible, you can check if hostname -f can be found in /etc/hosts, for example.

Jorgen Schäfer
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  • This seems exactly what I am looking for. The output of strace around the time emacs stops responding is here: [link](http://pastebin.com/Z5rW0Zt8). I had to kill the process after it stopped responding for a minute. It's really strange as it doesn't even look like a finished statement. – Tohiko Sep 06 '14 at 17:06
  • Yep, the system call never returns. Is /opt/share/info on a network mount point by any chance? – Jorgen Schäfer Sep 06 '14 at 21:56
  • Good catch. I should've thought of that. I unmounted /opt/share and now emacs runs fine. Not sure what emacs is doing in my /opt/share/ but I am glad I understand the problem now. Thanks for the help. Do you think such a thing is worth reporting? – Tohiko Sep 07 '14 at 11:53
  • The sequence of syscalls there looks like it's looking for info manuals. By default, Emacs looks in `/opt/` for info manuals (see the definition of `Info-default-directory-list` in `info.el`). I'm not sure if it's considered a bug that you can't avoid that initialization there. At least when `INFOPATH` is set, it shouldn't try to walk all those directories, I think. Might be worth a try at reporting it, but I wouldn't have too high hopes that it gets changed. :-) – Jorgen Schäfer Sep 07 '14 at 15:30
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You can try to use ppa for a daily emacs builds:

sudo apt-get purge emacs emacs-snapshot-common emacs-snapshot-bin-common emacs-snapshot emacs-snapshot-el emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs23 emacs23-bin-common emacs23-common emacs23-el emacs23-nox emacs23-lucid auctex apel emacs24 emacs24-bin-common emacs24-common emacs24-common-non-dfsg emacs24-el
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-el emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs-snapshot
Adobe
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  • Thanks. I am more interested in troubleshooting the problem. I want to know what the cause is in case this is a bug in emacs/Ubuntu or just my compilation setup. – Tohiko Sep 05 '14 at 10:15