Re: reducing emacs size by more frequent garbage-collect in loadup.el

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> As the Subject says, replacing each `load' line in loadup.el with 
> `load' + `garbage-collect' will reduce the size of the stripped emacs
> binary: (.7 is before, .8 is after the change)

> $ ls -l emacs-23.1.50.8 emacs-23.1.50.7
> -rwx------ 1 dann dann 6722788 Jul 24 14:20 emacs-23.1.50.8*
> -rwx------ 1 dann dann 6857956 Jul 24 14:20 emacs-23.1.50.7*

> $ size  emacs-23.1.50.8 emacs-23.1.50.7
>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> 1883659 4833256       0 6716915  667df3 emacs-23.1.50.8
> 1883659 4968424       0 6852083  688df3 emacs-23.1.50.7

> so we get about 2% reduction by doing something very simple and safe... 

> [This happens because loading multiple files generate more garbage that
> can be collected, but it is not returned to the OS, so it appears in
> the dumped image].

> Should we make this change?

I'd rather not uglify loadup.el with tons of calls to garbage-collect,
but maybe it's OK to replace all calls to load by calls to load&gc.
BTW, how does it affect the time to dump Emacs?

Another way to win similar improvements might be to lower the value of
gc-cons-threshold and friends during loadup.el.


        Stefan