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In my workflow I'm frequently opening files ranging from 50MB to several hundred MB from AFS volumes located over a wide geographical area. Whenever I open such a file emacs is unresponsive for several minutes. I understand why the file would take this time to load, but is there any way to open the file in the background while leaving the rest of the session responsive?

Thank you.

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So it's not about emacs being slow, but the network is slow. How about copying the remote file to a local file and when the transfer is finished then opening a local file with emacs? If the file is edited then it can be copied back remotely from the local file. It could even be automated with rsync or some other method.

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  • Possibly the detail concerning the AFS shares is a bit of a red herring, as you could obtain similar behavior with a several hundred MB gzipped file stored locally. I agree that in the case I just described gunzipping the file before attempting to open it with emacs would leave the session responsive for the majority of the operation, but it would be very convenient if there is some method by which this could all happen under the covers.
    – John Smith
    Jun 12, 2012 at 14:04
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    Emacs is single threaded, so I don't think it's possible, but you can ask the emacs devs.
    – Tom
    Jun 12, 2012 at 14:43
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    I think you're right, it doesn't look like what I'm hoping for is something natively supported. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
    – John Smith
    Jun 12, 2012 at 14:51

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