8.0.1 complaints on SLUG

[Chucko@CHARON.arc.nasa.gov (Charles R. Fry)]

    Date: Mon, 27 Aug 90 13:31 EDT
    From: Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (David A. Moon)

	Date: Sun, 26 Aug 90 11:31 EDT
	From: Qobi@zermatt.lcs.mit.edu (Jeffrey Mark Siskind)

	There is even some more random flakiness in Genera 8.0.1. Sometimes Zmacs gets
	wedged in such a way that typing self-inserting characters takes many SECONDS
	for it to process. This seems to happen when you edit a function and are in
	a temporary state where parenthesis are unbalanced. It can take Zmacs several
	MINUTES to echo a few dozen characters that I type. No paging, No GC, no other
	processes, the run light is solidly off before I type the characters, goes
	solidly on for a few mintues while it processes the typed input and then goes
	solidly off again.

    This doesn't happen to anyone else, as far as I know.  To find out what is
    happening while the machine is not responding, use c-m-Suspend.  If that doesn't
    respond, use h-c-Function and the FEP's Debug command.  Either way, you can get
    a backtrace.  The FEP debugger works about a million times better on Ivory
    machines than on 3600s, I hope you're using an Ivory-based machine as that will
    make your life easier.

One of the users here reported a similar problem.  It turned out he was
using a Zmacs non-file buffer as a temporary repository for random kills
and yanks, and had been editing in this buffer since the machine was
booted... 3 weeks previously.  The several-second delay was caused by
the new (in 7.2) Zmacs undo/redo facility recording his keystrokes.  Is
this possibly the cause of your problem?

This was discovered with c-m-Suspend, by the way.  Thanks to Symbolics
for providing useful debugging facilities!  (I'm discovering the hard
way why people prefer to do development on obsolete 36xx series Lispms,
even if some Un*x implementations might be faster to run on.)

 -- Chuck Fry  Chucko@Charon.ARC.NASA.GOV