Cygwin Emacs and two other Cygwin processes seem to do a lot of "other" I/O while seemingly idle

[Václav Zeman]

On 11/01/2013 07:15 PM, KARR, DAVID wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 11:20 AM
>> Subject: Cygwin Emacs and two other Cygwin processes seem to do a lot of
>> "other" I/O while seemingly idle
>>
>> Win7x32, Cygwin 1.7.25, Emacs 24.3.1.
>>
>> I've noticed when I scan the processes in SysInternals Process Explorer and
>> sort by "I/O Delta Other Bytes", my Cygwin Emacs process is almost always at
>> the top of the list.  In fact, the next processes in that sorted order are
>> "at-spi-bus-launcher" and "at-spi2-registryd", both also from Cygwin.  The
>> total from everything else in the list, again for the "I/O Delta Other Bytes"
>> value, is just a fraction of the total from these three processes.
>>
>> This is happening when Emacs is seemingly idle.
>>
>> I'm not sure what "Other" is, compared to read or write.  At the current
>> time, when I see it at the top of that sorted list, I don't see the disk
>> light flashing a lot, and my cpu indicator is pretty low.  Also at the
>> current time, I have four shell buffers open, all of which are just sitting
>> at the shell prompt (these are all that show up in "list-processes").
>>
>> However, I'm constantly annoyed with performance problems on my laptop, so
>> I'm wondering whether this is having any impact.
>>
>> This may be considered "trivial" or expected behavior, I'd just like to
>> understand it a bit.
> 
> I'm continuing to see this problem.  I find that when my system is very sluggish, if I check total IO, those three processes are at the top of the list, and this is when I'm not doing anything directly with Cygwin.  At this point, if I kill my Emacs, rxvt, and X server, my performance improves considerably.
> 
You could try running the emacs under strace to see what is going on in it.

-- 
VZ


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