piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum) (09/13/89)
I don't know if this is an Emacs problem, an X11 problem or a HP/UX problem: I have GNU Emacs version 18.53 running on a HP9000/340 with HP/UX 6.5 on X11. Regularly (i.e. at least once per day) emacs hangs while it is busy with something that is not interactive, e.g. executing a synchronous shell command (M-x shell-command). Emacs will then just not come back, it will not even redraw the window if some other window has temporarily been drawn over it. Today I tried to index a newsgroup that I had not read for ages (using Gnews/nntp) and everytime it just hung after about half a minute. It made me really tired. The only way out is to destroy the window using the window manager (but that does not get rid of the emacs process) or to kill Emacs from another window. By the way, I had the same problem with HP/UX version 6.2. Does anybody know what is causing this problem and what can be done about it? -- Piet van Oostrum, Dept of Computer Science, University of Utrecht Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands Telephone: +31-30-531806 Telefax: +31-30-513791 Internet: piet@cs.ruu.nl Uucp: mcvax!hp4nl!ruuinf!piet
seligman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Scott Seligman) (09/14/89)
(Piet van Oostrum) writes: >I don't know if this is an Emacs problem, an X11 problem or a HP/UX problem: > >I have GNU Emacs version 18.53 running on a HP9000/340 with HP/UX 6.5 on X11. >Regularly (i.e. at least once per day) emacs hangs while it is busy with >something that is not interactive, e.g. executing a synchronous shell >command (M-x shell-command). This sometimes happens to me, too. (The magic numbers are 18.54, HP9000/350, HP-UX6.5, and X11.) I have no idea what causes it, but I've found I can unwedge emacs by sending it a SIGALRM signal: "kill -ALRM <pid>". This probably does something terrible to emacs's internal state, but so far I haven't noticed any problems. Scott
rms@AI.MIT.EDU (09/14/89)
This may be fixed in the current version.
raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling) (09/14/89)
In article <11766@polya.Stanford.EDU>, seligman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Scott Seligman) writes: > (Piet van Oostrum) writes: > >I don't know if this is an Emacs problem, an X11 problem or a HP/UX problem: > > > >I have GNU Emacs version 18.53 running on a HP9000/340 with HP/UX 6.5 on X11. > >Regularly (i.e. at least once per day) emacs hangs while it is busy with > >something that is not interactive, e.g. executing a synchronous shell > >command (M-x shell-command). > > This sometimes happens to me, too. (The magic numbers are > 18.54, HP9000/350, HP-UX6.5, and X11.) That's exactly what's running on my workstation, except that it's been upgraded to a 370. As either a 350 or 370 I haven't seen such a problem. (OK, once while hacking elisp code I generated an infinite loop, but that was my own fault.) It's likely that I'm not doing the same things though. I believe the original message also referred to using Gnews, and a package such as Gnews would be a more likely candidate for the problem than emacs itself. Something like a M-x shell-command might possibly be vulnerable to some race condition in waiting for the shell process it creates to terminate. UNIX's architecture for process "management" invites that sort of thing -- in fact I have that problem in a different non-GNU program & haven't tracked it down yet. ---------------- Paul Raveling Raveling@isi.edu