desktop-auto-save-timeout

[Eli Zaretskii]

I wonder if the default value of this option (equal to
auto-save-timeout) is TRT.  The latter is used to auto-save our edits,
which are by definition precious, so people are likely to customize it
to small values (I have it at 15 sec).  By contrast, important desktop
changes are relatively rare, and even if some of them are lost, it's
not a disaster, at least not in general.

I've run Emacs 24.3.9x with the default value (which for me means
15sec) for some time, and the results are unpleasant: Emacs becomes
sluggish in its response whenever you look at the screen for more than
the timeout without typing anything.  E.g., start an I-search, then
make a pause to look at the text you found, then type C-s to continue
the search -- it takes a few seconds for Emacs to respond, probably
because the desktop's idle timer invokes desktop-save, which needs to
collect a non-trivial amount of data in a temp buffer, then run that
buffer through md5.  Very annoying.

Why not make the value of this variable nil by default, and let users
who think their desktop configuration is precious customize the
variable to some non-nil value?