bug#24284: Few seconds hang on startup, even with emacs -Q

[J. Braden Chancellor]

Whenever I open a file, Emacs hangs for a few seconds on the *scratch* buffer before proceeding to the file. The hang is about two seconds on my very fast desktop, about four seconds on my fast phone, and about six seconds on the decent servers I SSH into over satellite. It occurs whether I open the file normally (emacs test.txt), open it as a client of the daemon (emacsclient test.txt), or open it without an init file (emacs -Q test.txt). I've encountered this problem on four systems so far: a desktop running Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (emacs24-nox 24.3.1), a phone running Ubuntu via Termux on Android (emacs 25.0.95-1), a server running Ubuntu (emacs24-nox 24.5-1), and a server running Arch (emacs-nox 24.5-4 AND emacs25-git 25.1.r125112-1). I haven't seen it on my Fedora desktop (emacs-nox 25.1-0.2.rc1.fc24) or when using the unofficial emacs-w64 Windows client (emacs 25.0.94.2). I have already tried emacs -Q, completely removing my .emacs and .emacs.d, mucking about with my /etc/hosts, etc, and building Emacs from source. The only way to avoid the issue is to minimize Emacs (C-z), restore it (%emacs), and manually open the file I want to edit (C-x C-f). While it isn't a huge problem when staying around in a few files for a while, the seconds really add up when making a lot of small edits to many different files.

In GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

 of 2014-03-07 on lamiak, modified by Debian

System Description:     Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS

Configured using:

 `configure '--build' 'x86_64-linux-gnu' '--build' 'x86_64-linux-gnu'

 '--prefix=/usr' '--sharedstatedir=/var/lib' '--libexecdir=/usr/lib'

 '--localstatedir=/var/lib' '--infodir=/usr/share/info'

 '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--with-pop=yes'

 '--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs24:/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/24.3/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/24.3/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp'

 '--with-crt-dir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' '--with-x=no'

 '--without-gconf' '--without-gsettings' 'build_alias=x86_64-linux-gnu'

 'CFLAGS=-g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat

 -Werror=format-security -Wall' 'LDFLAGS=-Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions

 -Wl,-z,relro' 'CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2''

Important settings:

  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8

  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

  default enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Fundamental

Minor modes in effect:

  menu-bar-mode: t

  file-name-shadow-mode: t

  global-font-lock-mode: t

  auto-composition-mode: t

  auto-encryption-mode: t

  auto-compression-mode: t

  buffer-read-only: t

  line-number-mode: t

  transient-mark-mode: t

Recent input:

ESC x ESC x e m a c s - b u TAB TAB DEL DEL DEL DEL

DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL m a k e TAB - b

u g TAB DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL DEL

DEL DEL s e n d TAB DEL DEL DEL DEL r e p o r t TAB

RET

Recent messages:

("emacs")

Loading 00debian-vars...done

For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.

delete-backward-char: Text is read-only [5 times]

Making completion list...

delete-backward-char: Text is read-only [5 times]

Load-path shadows:

/usr/share/emacs/24.3/site-lisp/debian-startup hides /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/debian-startup

Features:

(shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml

mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev

gmm-utils mailheader sendmail regexp-opt rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums

mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils help-mode easymenu time-date ediff-hook

vc-hooks lisp-float-type tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode register

page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax

facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese

tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak

czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook

jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer loaddefs button faces

cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format

env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote

make-network-process dbusbind multi-tty emacs)