On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> wrote:

> John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >     o run top (or whatever equivalent is available on your OS) and see
> >       whether the CPU (or one of the CPUs) gets pegged at 100%
> utilization
> >       and stays there. If yes, that's an indication of an infinite loop
> >       somewhere.
> >
> > - quit any other instances of emacs/R
> > - start `top` in terminal
> > - execute block
> > - Use '<' '>' to sort back and forth between cpu and ram
> >
> > Observations
> > - R is at 80-100% cpu for about 5sec
> > - Then emacs shifts to fairly constant ~100% cpu usage
> > - After about a minute, the minibuffer expands to ~1/3 of the window
> height and fills with the csv
> > data
> > - Finished after ~5min total time
> > - So, R took about 5sec, emacs took another 5min to finish
> >
> >
>
> So not an infinite loop. That's progress ;-)
>
> Perhaps emacs is thrashing? If you are on linux, use swapon -s
> or (perhaps better) iostat, or (perhaps even better, at least if
> you are on the Gnome 2.x desktop[fn:1]), run the system monitor
> applet, click Properties, enable all the monitored resources
> (cpu, mem, net, swap, load, disk) and watch it while you are
> running the test: in particular, check memory and swap. If you
> are swapping even a little bit, that's enough to cause severe
> performacne problems[fn:2], which can be cured by using less memory
> (so stop any memory hogs from running) or by adding memory.
>
> Top can also show you memory and swap so maybe that's the quickest
> way to check.
>
>
It's not swap... :)

$ free
total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3978864    2427132    1551732          0     122072     509140
-/+ buffers/cache:    1795920    2182944
Swap:            0          0          0



Best regards,
John


> Nick
>
> Footnotes:
>
> [fn:1] You can pobably do this in other desktops but I have no
>        experience with them, so no guidance to give.
>
> [fn:2] My old laptop with 1GB of memory would swap whenever I ran mairix
>        to index my mail: it would take 30 minutes or so to finish.  My
>        new(er) laptop has 4GB and finishes in 30 seconds: memory usage
>        peaks at about 2.5 GB.
>
>