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Comment by KallDrexx | Hacker News Reader

You know what makes Emacs feel slow?

Corporate EDR BS.

I thought Emacs was terrible to use until I realized it was extremely fast on my home computer. All the pauses that EDR does combined with Emacs mostly single threadedness is a bummer. I still daily drive it now for my IDE at work because it's workflows work better for me than others, but it is such a bummer.

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(I think EDR here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endpoint_detection_and_respons... )

I've had good luck disabling the internet when I need my work computer to run faster. Those "security" checks are optional, and it'll let you work offline.

If just logging filesystem interactions and whatnot for future upload is also slow then you're hosed, but at one place I worked every application too an extra several seconds to start up for some sort of remote program inspection, which is fine till the application is git, grep, or cd.

MS Defender. I will dump it in a landfill if I could.

you know you can give it exclusions?

Yes. But it is locked down in our corporate Macs. Still, one named folder is excluded and we shove _everything_ into that folder.

It still pegs the CPU frequently. It is extremely irritating to open the Activity Monitor and see it at the top.

What good is it in a Mac anyway? This is a not a virus ridden OS like back in the day Windows.

Do you notice this on macOS or Linux?

I definitely notice an EDR tax on macOS generally, but I haven't noticed Emacs having issues specifically. It's usually certain I/O operations like Git or tarball extraction that become slow.

For me it can be slow, especially refreshing magit (which probably is blocked by git, blocked by the bs)(on MacOS)

magit is brutal when EDR is involved.

Try checking what M-x magit-toggle-verbose-refresh has to say, you may be able to identify what's slow and optimize around it

I would guess the roundtrip of intercepting every file stat call in the repo, it's very lovely. But will check.

I notice it on macOS, which I use for work. I use Linux personally but no EDR there :)

There are just so many little operations that cause stuttering on macOS with an unfortunately over-eager crowdstrike configuration. Magit is the worst offender but it causes paper cuts all over :(

> I notice it on macOS

So, on Mac there are two main problems - displaying and fork/exec.

Rendering on Mac is slower because NS port display backend just sucks. Emacs's redisplay emits many small drawing operations per frame - one per glyph run, cursor, or fringe bitmap. X11/cairo and pgtk on Linux batch those very efficiently - Cocoa has nothing comparable here.

You can try installing one of the forks of Mitsuharu's port - they usually have --with-metal flag and some other improvements, but they are typically one-two versions lagging behind, and in my experience they are not always stable. In general, possibility of Emacs dying on Mac is not zero, on Linux is much more rock solid.

And then the forking problem. Emacs has a big heap, so each fork is expensive. On Mac it triggers all sorts of crap - code-signature validation, Gatekeeper/XProtect scanning, TCC checks. That's dozens of milliseconds per subprocess and Linux has no such crap to deal with - shit is just fast. Magit calls git dozens of times per refresh. Now multiply that and then you get usual complains - pestilence on poor Jonas Bernoulli: "I love Magit, but why is it so damn slow..." etc.

Here are some things that I do to mitigate:

- Do these and never touch keyboard rate settings in the UI, just do it, reboot and thank me later.

      # "Set a blazingly fast keyboard repeat rate, "
      defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 1
      # "Set a shorter Delay until key repeat"
      defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 9

- disable App Nap for Emacs:

      defaults write org.gnu.Emacs NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

- I turned off Spotlight indexer completely - I don't search for files through it nor through Alfred.

      sudo mdutil -a -i off

- Set `core.fsmonitor true` in gitconfig. Add `core.untrackedCache true` to go with `status.showuntrackedfiles all`, otherwise the fsmonitor win is partly eaten by the untracked scan.

- Remove sections from Magit you don't need all the time, e.g.:

     ;; who cares if tags not displayed in magit-refs buffer?
     (remove-hook 'magit-refs-sections-hook #'magit-insert-tags)

There are some other things, but that's what I remember off the top of my head, if I recall some more, will update.

Interesting thanks I'll give some of these a try.

I know at least some of my slowness is crowdstrike, especially since I can A/B test non-Emacs operations with some coworkers with older machines that don't have the bad config.

Great list, thank you. I recently switched to a Macbook for work and I could feel the difference in speed whenever I used Emacs back on my desktop (Linux).

This helps a bit though magit still feels very sluggish.

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