Re: Skipping unexec via a big .elc file

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Apr 3, 2017, at 15:14, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>
>> Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2017 14:35:16 -0400
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> Despite a few little speed-ups, I’ve got my doubts as to whether it’s going to be fast enough.
> 
> I published my preliminary timings in these 2 messages:
> 
>  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-12/msg00923.html
>  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-12/msg00959.html

Yes, I got some speedups, but I didn’t get it as fast as I was hoping.  Some of my changes since your second message above might’ve improved the numbers a little, but some (like loading the doc pointers at startup, and I think “uniquify” is going to need to be loaded at startup too because it attaches advice to “rename-buffer” which we can’t save properly) may slow it a little too.

I was aiming for a startup time under a tenth of a second, and didn’t get there, though there were a couple of additional things that could be tried, with some effort.  I’m not sure a startup time of nearly a fifth of a second will feel for people.  If they start Emacs once as part of logging in, it probably won’t be an issue.  If they start it every time they want to edit a file, it may be annoying to have the startup time increased by even 0.15s.

Still, I suppose we can let people try it out, and find out what they think.  Then we can decide if it’s good enough, if further speedup measures are worth exploring, or if it’s a dead end.

Ken