bug#122: 23.0.60; Slowdown in directory scanning over time.

[Len Trigg]

At Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:08:07 -0400,
Richard M. Stallman wrote:
> 
>     The calls seem to be in a fairly even balance of mixture of
>     Fget_buffer and Fgarbage_collect.  Why creating a list of files in a
>     directory should be calling get_buffer is beyond me.
> 
> The backtrace shows why.  It is making a new code-conversion buffer.

Yes, but as an emacs user (rather than programmer), I think of buffers
as being fairly heavyweight things (after all, they contain all the
text I'm editing, and a typical user probably only has a few dozen
open), compared to calling some kind of straight string conversion
function.  Perhaps that is an invalid assumption and buffers are
lightweight.

> There must be a bug in the logic that decides whether to make a new
> code-conversion buffer, so that it makes too many of them.

It seems this is likely to be the problem.  This morning there are 225
code-conversion-work buffers hanging around, and my directory listing
takes 11 seconds.


Cheers,
Len.