Subject: Re: bug#20015: 25.0.50; Slow Emacs startup after recent TRAMP changes

From: Daniel Colascione <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 14:34:40 -0800

On 03/06/2015 11:17 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>>>> % time getent ahosts host.does.not.exist
>>>> getent ahosts host.does.not.exist  0,00s user 0,00s system 0% cpu 30,013 total
>>> Which means your system is misconfigured.
>>
>> But that's no excuse to impose such a 30s timeout on the user who did
>> not actually do anything that would explicitly trigger this problem.
> 
> A working hostname lookup is a fundamental part of the system.

In theory. In practice, lookup is broken all the time, and for good
reason. We can't always know right away when we don't have connectivity.
What if I'm on a train and enter a tunnel? Connectivity is interrupted
for a little while, but not enough to trigger OS network
reconfiguration. It's inexcusable for Emacs to block for 30 seconds on
DNS resolution in this case.