Speed up Emacs start-up time

Question

I have seen this thread but my problem is an order of magnitude larger. Also, a newbie, I did not understand much of what was being discussed there. So, this new question.

I am running Emacs 25.2.2 on Kubuntu 17.10 on a low-range laptop computer with 4GB RAM. Consider:

user:~/ $ time nvim +qall                                                                          
nvim +qall  0.63s user 0.17s system 86% cpu 0.921 total
user:~/ $ time emacs -nw -kill                                                                     
emacs -nw -kill  81.70s user 9.00s system 93% cpu 1:36.84 total
user:~/ $ time emacs -nw -q -kill                                                                  
emacs -nw -q -kill  0.32s user 0.07s system 10% cpu 3.636 total

Something seems to be grossly wrong with my setup. But I do not know what is it.

So, what do I need to do to bring the start-up time for emacs down to a more reasonable number?

My ~/.emacs file contains several lines. I do not know which ones will be relevant here. So, please ask me and I will edit my question accordingly.

Answer 1

Whatever your .emacs and its improvements, you also should consider running emacs as a server at your session's opening :

emacs --daemon

Now, running emacs with

emacsclient -t

or

emacsclient -nw -c

or ... (see options) will be much faster

Answer 2

1) I have found esup to be a very convenient for Emacs startup profiling.

You just run M-x esup and get back list of all expressions in your init.el sorted by the time they took to execute. You don't need to restart Emacs or add anything special to the config, so narrowing on the slow down suspect becomes much easier.

2) I (use-package :defer t) all the things and avoid (require ), so the packages are only loaded when needed.

My issue wasn't as severe as yours, but I went from 7s to 1.7s startup on my old MacBook Air without giving up any of the packages I use.

Answer 3

Side note, it is generally considered a good idea to have your startup code in ~/.emacs.d/init.el rather than ~/.emacs, one less hiden file in your home directory, a suffix so that other editors can guess the contents....

For bisection, the idea is that you stop running your .emacs about half way and see if it still takes a lot of time. If it does then you know that the problem is in the first half, otherwise you know it is in the second half. You then divide the half that has a problem and stop running half way through that half, so either at the 1/4 or 3/4 mark of the original file. Now you know which quarter (half of a half) is troublesome, so you can break that down into halves and find which eighth is a problem, repeat until you are down to a single function call.

The easiest way to stop running at a point in a file is to add a line

(error "Stopping .emacs")

For profiling the code, you can add

(profiler-start 'cpu)

as the first line of your startup file and add the two lines

(profiler-report)
(profiler-stop)

at the end.

Answer 4

My guess is that you have set up Emacs to save your session and have accumulated hundreds of buffers in various modes.

Try C-x C-b and clean up using d (to mark buffers for deletion) and x (to delete buffers marked in that manner).