skeeto
commented
5 years ago Fetching 30 to 50 feeds should only disrupt Emacs for a couple of seconds, so this isn't normal.
The very first thing to check is that Elfeed is using curl to fetch feeds. The variable elfeed-use-curl indicates whether curl will be used or not, and it will automatically set to t if curl was found when Elfeed was loaded. If it's nil, you should install curl and ensure it's on your PATH. This has two major benefits:
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url-retrieve isn't nearly as asynchronous as advertised, especially for certain platforms, but curl is always fully asynchronous. The synchronous parts of url-retrieve will block Emacs, but not make it use 100% CPU.
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url-queue-retrieve doesn't allow for custom headers, which means Elfeed can't take advantage of ETag or If-Modified-Since. These features prevent Elfeed from reparsing feeds that haven't changed. (It's also much nicer to servers.) Elfeed spends most of its time parsing XML, and XML parsing is not done asynchronously, so this is important. If you're not using curl, Emacs will spend more time at 100% CPU when fetching.
Also make sure Elfeed has been byte-compiled. This should happen automatically if you installed it via package.el.
Since you're seeing such excessive memory use, it sounds like one of the feeds you're fetching may be humongous. A casual experiment suggests that, on 64-bit computers, the s-expression representation of an RSS feed is about four times larger than the XML content. This is due to all the pointer overhead (lots of cons cells for each element). But if you're seeing 4GB of memory use, then that puts the feed at about 800MB (buffer + s-exp = 4GB), which seems unlikely. Even more so for the 8GB case.
Take a look at each of the feeds in your list and see if any of them are particularly large. Also have Elfeed fetch them one at a time to see which one causes the problem. If you can narrow it down to a particular feed, I'd like to know about it.
testinggithub1222
mssdvd
I have been using elfeed for a while now and build up like 30 to 50 rss list. Whenever I call elfeed-update to update everything, it takes quite a long time and hang emacs during the time. It might be 20mn, i am not sure. It consumes 100% of cpu and 54% of my ram which should be 4gb of 8gb of ram and garbage collection always collect. So, my question is, is there a way to make this run faster without interruption or hang emacs? Is that parsing xml consume that much cpu and took so long period of time? Isn't there async process?