auctex startup improvements and osx

[ivowel@gmail.com]

I am running Gnu Emacs 24.5.1 on OSX Yosemite, binary download from http://emacsformacosx.com/ . when auctex is installed (via standard package-list-packages), version 11.88.5, i.e., into the .emacs.d/elpa directory, then auctex is loaded when a .tex file is visited, even in the absence of an init.el.  good.

problem: starting emacs on a retina i7 iMac to edit a latex source file now takes about 5 seconds on an empty or 1-page latex article.  during this time, the emacs bottom states "For information about the Gnu System..." for these 5 seconds, and then it proceeds as expected.  No errors or warnings.  Just slow.

Loading emacs with non-tex files is instant.  Starting emacs on a latex file with the -q option is instant.  yet, starting emacs [without any init.el files but without -q] on a .tex file loads auctex from the elpa/auctex-11.88.5 files with a startup delay of 5 seconds. 

my hostname is fully qualified (xxx.anderson.ucla.edu).  a cli 'hostname' command shows me that this is correct.  the cli 'domainname' is empty, but it does not seem to matter.

now, I tried to (setq TeX-parse-self t) and (setq TeX-auto-save t), and created a local auto/ subdirectory, but 'opensnoop | grep /Users/me/' shows me that emacs does not even attempt to save a parsed latex version in this "cache" like directory.  this may be obsolete by now?!

staring at "top" output while emacs is waiting suggests that slow loading is not an issue of a CPU bottleneck.  I am guessing that emacs is waiting up for something to happen or become available, and then falls back to what it should be doing in the first place.

now, there are two emacs installations on my system, the standard OSX distribution of 22.1.1 and the new emacs 24.5.1 distribution.  it may well be the case that the binary distribution has some problems.  In particular, I see that it queries whole hierarchies in '/Library/Application Support/Emacs/' which does not exist.  linking ln -sf /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp /Library/Application\ Support/Emacs/24.5/site-lisp did not fix the slow startup.  oh well...  at this point, I am beyond my abilities.

this is probably my fault.  I am not an emacs expert, but I am also not an emacs novice.

whatever slows emacs down to such glacial speed makes a bad impression on novices that are switching to emacs.  it would be useful to build some more intelligence [at least some warnings] into the emacs auctex startup.  hope this helps.


PS: possibly related to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28622218/emacs-auctex-slow-to-start, which has not been answered.