Re: emacs very slow; zombie processes eventually cleared

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 7/2/2013 11:41 AM, Rockefeller, Harry wrote:
> When I start emacs I get this message:
> (emacs:192): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_distribute_natural_allocation: assertion `extra_space >= 0' failed

Are you saying that this happens every time you start emacs?  Does it 
even happen when you start with 'emacs -Q'?  If not, maybe you could do 
some testing to figure out what in your initialization (including X11 
initialization) triggers it.  This might help to pin down the bug.

> Maybe when zombies are present (as reported by 'top') I get several of these messages:
> (emacs:192): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_window_parse_geometry() called on a window with no visible children; the window should be set up before gtk_window_parse_geometry() is called.

This is a bogus warning and can be ignored.  It will be suppressed in 
future releases of emacs.

> Perhaps I have too many 'helper' programs running?
> e.g., why are there 3 dbus-daemon processes?
> Here is the result of 'ps':
>        PID    PPID    PGID     WINPID   TTY     UID    STIME COMMAND
>       6028       1    4792       3460  ?       11097 08:24:51 /usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi-bus-launcher
>       7632    5844    7632       3256  pty2    11097 10:07:40 /usr/bin/ps
>       5908       1    4792       4804  ?       11097 08:24:52 /usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi2-registryd
>       2480       1    2480       2480  ?       11097 08:22:47 /usr/bin/XWin
>       5772    6028    4792       5820  ?       11097 08:24:52 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon
> I    5388    1968    5388       5696  pty0    11097 08:23:02 /usr/bin/bash
>        192    5388     192       4688  pty0    11097 08:24:44 /usr/bin/emacs-X11
>       4696    5388    5388        604  pty0    11097 08:23:11 /usr/bin/xterm
>       1968       1    1968       1968  cons0   11097 08:23:00 /usr/bin/xterm
>       5844    4696    5844        228  pty2    11097 08:23:12 /usr/bin/bash
>       4792       1    4792       4792  ?       11097 08:24:51 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon
>       3436       1     192       3436  pty0    11097 08:24:51 /usr/bin/dbus-launch
>       5576       1    5576       5576  ?       11097 08:23:13 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon

My system is similar, but I only have two dbus-daemons running.  And 
when I exit from the X server, all these 'helper' processes disappear.

I think I might have mentioned once before when you wrote about zombie 
processes that there is a known problem in emacs-24.3 that can cause 
problems with subprocesses.  This is caused by race conditions between 
emacs and glib.  The problem has recently been fixed on the emacs 
development trunk.  If you'd like, I could build emacs from a snapshot 
of the trunk and let you test it to see if some of your problems go away.

Ken


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