Re: Emacs 23.0 is much slower starting than Emacs 22.3

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, David!

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 05:46:51PM +0100, David De La Harpe Golden wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> >>>I have an extremely medium speed processor (Athlon 1.2 GHz) and, at
> >>>the moment, a well-padded .emacs.desktop.

> >>>Starting Emacs 22.3 takes 23 seconds.
> >>>Starting Emacs 23.0 takes 38 seconds.


> >The above times were on tty's.  Trying it on X-Windows, there was no
> >difference (or, at most, 1 or 2 seconds longer).

> >>        Stefan


> FWIW, I'd find your emacs22 time pretty unacceptable, never mind the
> emacs23 one, even on a 1.2GHz-class machine. Are a lot of people
> putting up with that sort of start time? Ouch.

Hey, don't be so hard on my poor little PC!  It's getting on a bit[*].
There's 83 files being loaded by desktop, with a total of 7801019 bytes.

emacs-22 -Q starts in ~0.4 seconds.
emacs-23 -Q starts in ~0.7 seconds.

[*] For non-native English speakers: "he's getting on a bit" is a
euphemism for "he's too old (for something)".

> Of course it could be an emacs bug triggered on your system and not
> mine, but I kinda wonder: is it only emacs or is everything slow? Is it
> only slow to start or slow to update the display and whatnot?  Makes me
> think you might have a local system issue causing an I/O bottleneck, is
> all, maybe no DMA on your HDD, or your system's low on RAM and is
> already swapping or something.

It's a 7 year old PC, with a 7 yo HDD, but with plenty of RAM (768 Mb).
You really think 23 seconds is slow, loading emacs + 83 files?

> On my admittedly higher-end newish multicore (but each core is only ~ 
> 2GHz and emacs isn't parallelized...) gnu+linux system, emacs23 takes 1 
> to 2 seconds to start, .....

How many file does your desktop load, and what's their total size?

> , ..... including the ridiculous happy-dance across the screen the
> initial X11 frame does (known-bug afaik), and I thought it was getting
> a bit sluggish (whenever an app start time is > 1 sec I start to notice
> and get irritated), but I put it down to the happy-dancing.   With a
> .emacs.desktop of 100 random .el files from the emacs source tree,
> start time was 2 to 3 seconds.

OK, 100 random files.el.  How big were they?

> Iceweasel takes 2 to 3 secs and oowriter (probably the bloatiest thing I 
> have installed)  11 secs ?

Firefox 1.0.4 takes ~2.5 secs to load (but it was probably in the disk
cache when I timed it).

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).