emacs freezes doing DNS lookup

Skaperen · 04-28-2011, 09:35 AM

When emacs freezes doing a DNS lookup, that makes it rather hard to fix a network configuration file. Why does it need to do that?

kbp · 04-29-2011, 05:32 AM

Sorry, I don't use emacs... but a quick fix would be to use a plain text editor like vi, nano .. etc.

cheers

Skaperen · 04-29-2011, 08:35 AM

In emergency situations like that, I need a familiar keybinding. I've been using emacs for 29 years. But lately they've been doing some really oddball programming on it. It's as if they don't understand stuff like DNS but try to use it, anyway.

markush · 04-29-2011, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skaperen

... I've been using emacs for 29 years. But lately they've been doing some really oddball programming on it...

only lately??? I thought this "editor" has always been overloaded with everything....

but I agree with kbp, you should use an editor instead of emacs.

Markus

Skaperen · 05-02-2011, 10:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by markush

only lately??? I thought this "editor" has always been overloaded with everything....

but I agree with kbp, you should use an editor instead of emacs.

Markus

Well, maybe it's been there a while, but I haven't seen any activity to do DNS lookups for routine editing until recently. Or maybe this only recently made it into a blocking DNS query.

markush · 05-02-2011, 11:36 AM

What I don't understand is why are the DNS-lookups going on? did you check the network-traffic with tcpdump? If your NIC is eth0 use

Code:

tcpdump -i eth0 port 53

in order to check the dns-lookup-traffic. This may verify that actually the lookups make emacs so slow.

Markus

Skaperen · 05-02-2011, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by markush

What I don't understand is why are the DNS-lookups going on? did you check the network-traffic with tcpdump? If your NIC is eth0 use

Code:

tcpdump -i eth0 port 53

in order to check the dns-lookup-traffic. This may verify that actually the lookups make emacs so slow.

Markus

Did that. It was querying the hostname itself when emacs started.

markush · 05-02-2011, 04:28 PM

If I understand you correctly you mean that Emacs looks up the ip-adress of the local machine? Maybe you can suppress this with an adequate entry in the /etc/hosts file.

Markus

Skaperen · 05-03-2011, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by markush

If I understand you correctly you mean that Emacs looks up the ip-adress of the local machine? Maybe you can suppress this with an adequate entry in the /etc/hosts file.

Markus

I've considering that. But that means deploying a system of updating /etc/hosts, because other programs would be doing lookups and need it to be accurate across all the hosts. This is normally what DNS is for.

I think at this point, just installing an alternate editor like jed will be the quick solution. Emacs is certainly very powerful. I just think that power has gone to the heads of the developers.