Re: [Texmacs-dev] Disastrous boot time for new versions

[Leo]

On Monday March 03 2003 06:34, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> I have continued the reorganization of the Guile/Scheme interface.
> Unfortunately, we have to pay a big price for that: the boot time
> explodes. On a 1GHz PC, I noticed an increase of about 3.5 sec (so 17.5
> sec on a 200MHz PC?). This is clearly unacceptable, so we will have to
> work hard to reduce this to a more acceptable increase (1 sec would be
> reasonable, since almost all menu/keyboard logic has been transferred).
>
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If I recall correctly there is a powerful technique to drastically
cut the startup time. It is (or was) used by TeX and Emacs and is sometimes
referred to as "unexec".

The idea is quite simple. During last stages of the build process the
program starts, loads in all the standard configuration information
(*.elc for Emacs, format file for TeX) and then dumps the memory in
ELF executable format.  This memory dump becomes the real executable
for the program.  Starting this new executable effectively bypasses
loading and processing of the startup scripts and config.files which
apparently dominated TeX or Emacs startup process.

There are two drawbacks here:
1: portability might become an issue
2: executable has now larger footprint (mute point by today's disk space 
standards)

--Leo--