Recent recentf slowdown due to "/ftp:..."

[Stephen Berman]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:56:09 +0200 Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:11:11 +0200 Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> *Messages*.  But at startup there was again a pause when the echo area
>> displayed the message "Cleaning up the recentf list...".  This time it
>> lasted about 30 seconds, then startup completed and Emacs appears to be
>> running normally.  However, the complete recentf message is "Cleaning up
>> the recentf list...done (0 removed)", so I assume 30 seconds is too long
>> and indicative of a problem.  With this emacs process running I started
>> another Emacs with my initializations, including the same recentf file,
>> and it came up without a pause.  Same thing with `emacs -Q --eval
>> "(recentf-mode 1)"'.
>
> I continue to see this misbehavior, i.e. a ca. 30 stillstand while the
> recentf list is being cleaned up, even with 0 files removed.  Today I
> reproduced it with -Q -l test.el, the latter file consisting solely of
> this:
>
> (custom-set-variables
>  '(recentf-mode t))
>
> This was with my recentf file.  Again there was a ca. 30 second pause
> (one file was removed).  I have not been able to reproduce the pause by
> repeating this with a new emacs process but the same login session.
> Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be, or a suggestion
> about how to try and track it down?

I've narrowed it down to the above sexp as the entire content of
~/.emacs and this ~/.recentf:

,----
| ;;; Automatically generated by `recentf' on Fri Jul  3 12:53:43 2009.
| 
| (setq recentf-list
|       '(
|         "/ftp:address@hidden:/"
|         ))
| 
| (setq recentf-filter-changer-current 'nil)
| 
| 
| ;; Local Variables:
| ;; coding: utf-8-emacs
| ;; End:
`----

The above ftp site is made up but it still resulted in a 30 second pause
(I have real ftp sites in my normal recentf-file).  Again, this only
happens with the first Emacs started in a given login session, and I've
only been experiencing this since updating from the trunk after the 23.1
branch was created.  That update included the new Tramp update and Tramp
appears to be implicated by the above ftp line, though, as I already
mentioned, adding (setq tramp-verbose 8) to ~/.emacs produces no Tramp
debug buffer.

Steve Berman