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

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> writes:

  > 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.

Ping.  Any decision on this?