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

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

  > > 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?

It's in the noise for a 3 year old machine that I tried it on.

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

This sounds like it's a bit more complicated...