2014-09-17 11:06 GMT+02:00 Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>:

> On Wednesday, 17 Sep 2014 at 18:54, Alexis wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > If i may ask, which email front-end were you using? (Gnus, perhaps?) i
> > used to use notmuch.el, and currently use mu4e, and basically don't have
> > this issue ....
>
> The issue is not the email front-end per se but the email servers (IMAP,
> POP, whatever).  A couple of years ago, I ended up having to use an
> email server that would take many seconds, often minutes, to access,
> even just to query to find out if there was any new email.
>
> The easiest solution, for me, was to get into the habit of starting two
> emacs instances.  The first for all my work (org, writing, coding, etc.)
> and a second just for email.  The first starts the emacs server so
> emacsclient always goes to the non-email instance.  I've been doing this
> for two years now and it has become second nature for me.
>
> Obviously, the real fix is to have proper multi-threading in Emacs and,
> as in nuclear fusion, this will be with us *soon* ;-)
>

I disagree on this. The problem is less servers than the sheer slowness of
elisp.
And Gnus offers so many fancy opportunities to process your mail that it is
easy to
overuse it.

Emacs won't become any more efficient without switching its own elisp
implementation to something with a true compiler (or jit).

Threading would gain some responsiveness, but that may not be so obvious
nor so easy to implement.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ConcurrentEmacs
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NoThreading

Fabrice