Byte-compile it: $ emacs -Q -batch -f batch-byte-compile /tmp/timeit.el Load it with each Emacs build four times: $ for i in {0..3}; do ./src/emacs -Q -l /tmp/timeit.elc; done Calculate mean timings: $ for t in /tmp/timings*.txt; do awk '{s+=$1}END{print FILENAME,s/NR}' "$t"; done /tmp/timings-27.txt 28.3246 /tmp/timings-28.txt 31.7968 Emacs 27 build info: In GNU Emacs 27.1.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, cairo version 1.16.0, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2020-12-05 built on thunk Repository revision: 6916e7954ab5de5e2dc7b25f165a63396d0e70a0 Repository branch: emacs-27 Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12008000 System Description: Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid Configured using: 'configure 'CC=ccache gcc' 'CFLAGS=-O2 -march=native' --prefix=/home/blc/.local --program-suffix=27-opt --with-x-toolkit=lucid --with-file-notification=yes --with-x --with-cairo' Configured features: XAW3D XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG CAIRO SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS GLIB NOTIFY INOTIFY ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE HARFBUZZ M17N_FLT LIBOTF ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS LUCID X11 XDBE XIM MODULES THREADS LIBSYSTEMD JSON PDUMPER LCMS2 GMP Emacs 28 build info: In GNU Emacs 28.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, cairo version 1.16.0, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2020-12-05 built on thunk Repository revision: dc39c66d3bb6b1db6af0519659ff154bf6d8a5d1 Repository branch: master Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12008000 System Description: Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid Configured using: 'configure 'CC=ccache gcc' 'CFLAGS=-O2 -march=native' --config-cache --prefix=/home/blc/.local --with-x-toolkit=lucid --with-file-notification=yes --with-x' Configured features: XAW3D XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG CAIRO SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS GLIB NOTIFY INOTIFY ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE HARFBUZZ M17N_FLT LIBOTF ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS LUCID X11 XDBE XIM MODULES THREADS LIBSYSTEMD JSON PDUMPER LCMS2 Other info: value of $LANG: en_IE.UTF-8 value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix $ grep 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo | awk -F: 'NR==1{print $2}' Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz $ grep -c 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo 4 $ gcc --version gcc (Debian 10.2.0-19) 10.2.0 $ uname -a Linux thunk 5.9.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.9.11-1 (2020-11-27) x86_64 GNU/Linux HTH, -- Basil