25.8 Emacs Using 100% CPU
Historic This seems to be a problem with emacs recently (late 2006 and into 2007). I eventually tracked down a solution that seems to fix emacs-snapshot on Debian, from http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-501837-highlight-emacs+cpu.html. I followed the instructions but it started happening again, probably because the source code for the fix (as detailed below) is in a couple of places.
A quick fix is to set the Emacs variable
semantic-idle-scheduler-idle-time to a large number (by
default it is 2 seconds) so that the idle scheduler does not kick in
(which is what is using all the CPU)!
The actual solution below edits the file semantic-idle.el and
ensures all binary copies of it are replaced (including, for me,
emacs-snapshot/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.elc, which
did not seem to have a source version).
So, first edit the file
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.el to
comment out line 290:
Similarly, comment out line 294, but be sure to retain the final three closing braces:
Next, start up, as root, a new emacs and byte compile the package:
$ sudo emacs -nw -q
M-x byte-compile-file <ret>
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.el
C-x C-cAs mentioned above, copy the byte copmiled version across to
emacs-snapshot/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.elc.
Now start up Emacs and hopefully it won’t consume all the CPU again!
Edward Garson reports (28 Apr 2007) that the same fix works for XP and Fedora 6.
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