[OS X Emacs] faster aquamacs ?

Jean-Christophe Helary jean.christophe.helary at gmail.com
Tue Nov 30 08:35:00 EST 2010


On 30 nov. 10, at 22:20, David Reitter wrote:

>> Basically when I launch Emacs.app from Spotlight, the app appears almost instantaneously. With Aquamacs, I need to wait 4-5 seconds. That's on a 3ghz Core 2 Duo with 8gb of ram.
> 
> That's because Aquamacs loads a lot of Lisp-level code, while Emacs.app doesn't.   Some of it can be (and has been) pre-compiled into the binary (see the file site-load.el).  To make startup faster, one would have to move more of the initialization code into site-load.el.   This comes with a range of caveats, the simple one being that most of the code that is not preloaded relies on runtime-only information (such as paths), or that strings and vectors need special treatment.  Feel free to work on this.
> 
> I start my Aquamacs once a week or so and let it run.  With 8 GB, why not do the same?

Indeed :)

> Aquamacs does not take very long to start (from cache):

It is longer than any text editor I have on this machine.

I understand the above explanations but take a look at that:

Emacs.app:
$ time ../Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -q -eval '(kill-emacs)'
real	0m0.884s
user	0m0.228s
sys	0m0.124s

Aquamacs.app:
$ time ../Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs -q -eval '(kill-emacs)' 
real	0m2.794s
user	0m2.018s
sys	0m0.259s

That's more than 4 times as long.

Jean-Christophe Helary
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