GNU bug report logs - #24849
Is Emacs put in idle mode when window is not focused?

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From: Johan Andersson <johan.andersson <at> burtcorp.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 24849 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#24849: Is Emacs put in idle mode when window is not focused?
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2016 20:48:59 +0100

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Sorry for not being clear enough.

With Prodigy, you define a service. Usually that is a path, command and
arguments to the command. You can then via the Prodigy GUI manage
(start/stop/restart/etc...) these services.

To put it very simple, what happens in Prodigy when a service is started is
basically this:

(let* ((default-directory "/tmp")
       (process (start-process "server" nil "python" "-m"
"SimpleHTTPServer" "8000")))
  (set-process-filter
   process
   (lambda (_ output)
     ;; ...
     )))

What happens in practice is that, when I get to work, I select the services
I need and start them (unless Emacs was killed, they are already started).
Sometimes I use Emacs quite frequently and then this is not so much of an
issue because Emacs does not have time to idle. But when I don't use Emacs
for a while, it will hang waiting for the response from the service
(because Emacs is idle).

Hope you understand my issue better!

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 5:22 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Johan Andersson <johan.andersson <at> burtcorp.com>
> > Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2016 09:44:20 +0100
> >
> > I have written an Emacs package called Prodigy (
> https://github.com/rejeep/prodigy.el/). The package is used
> > to manage external services from within Emacs. A service is some kind of
> running process, usually a web
> > server or database.
> >
> > There has always been an issue that I have not investigated further. It
> seems that after a while, if Emacs is
> > not focused, it ends up in some idle mode. The effect is that requests
> are very slow, almost hangs for a few
> > seconds. If I focus the Emacs window, the request goes through
> immediately.
> >
> > The reason I'm asking about it now is that this has gotten even worse in
> Emacs 25.
> >
> > My question is if anyone knows what this is about and if it's possible
> to solve?
>
> Please describe in more detail what you package does and how it is
> related to "non-idle" Emacs.  IOW, why does your package care whether
> Emacs is idle or not.
>
> My suspicion is that your package somehow assumes that the Emacs main
> loop is always running at the same fast speed, which is not true.  In
> particular, when the frame doesn't have the focus, Emacs 25 stops the
> blinking cursor timer, and if that is the only high-frequency activity
> in Emacs (i.e. there's no other timers or external events that drive
> the event loop), then yes, Emacs will only crank the event loop at
> very low frequency.
>
> But I'm not sure this is related to your problem, because I don't know
> what does your package expect from Emacs.
>



-- 
Johan Andersson
System Developer, Burt
www.burtcorp.com
Cell: +46 761 041607
https:// <http://twitter.com/rejeep>github.com/rejeep |
http://twitter.com/rejeep | http://twitter.com/burtcorp

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