Emacs Start-Up: Speeding It Up

Describes my Emacs start-up file, and what I did to speed it up from 12 seconds to under 4 seconds.

• Byte-compile start-up files.
• Temporarily increase gc-cons-threshold during startup.
• Load package autoloads (not packages) during start-up.
• Use eval-after-load to advantage for post-package setup.
• Lexically bind file-name-handler-alist to nil if start-up is split across many files.
• Used memoization to avoid network lookup of current location during startup.

I have a large number of elpa/melpa packages installed:

(length load-path)

400

With the above, my emacs (Emacs 26 built from Git) startup time is on average 4 seconds. This includes starting up emacspeak (including speech servers), as well as launching a number of project-specific shell buffers. Given that I rarely restart Emacs, the startup time is academic — but speeding up Emacs startup did get me to clean-up my Emacs setup.

I have now used Emacs for more than 25 years, and my Emacs start-up file has followed the same structure through this time.

1. The init file defines a start-up-emacs function that does the bulk of the work.
2. Package-specific configuration is split up into <package>-prepare.el files.
3. All of these files are byte-compiled.

As a first step, I added code to my start-up file to time the loading of various modules.

I keep my emacs-startup.el checked into GitHub. My Emacs init-file is a symlink to the byte-compiled version of the above — this is something that goes back to my time as a grad-student at Cornell (when GitHub of course did not exist). That is also when I originally learnt the trick of temporarily setting gc-cons-threshold to 8MB — Emacs' default is 800K.

Over time, some of the package-specific setup files had come to directly load packages — it just made it easier to do package-specific setup at the time. As part of the cleanup, I updated these to strictly load package-autoload files and wrapped post-package setup code in eval-after-load — this is effectively the same as using use-package.

Emacs has an extremely flexible mechanism for loading files — this means you can load compressed, encrypted or remote files without having to worry about it. That flexibility comes at a cost — if you are sure you dont need this flexibility during start-up, then locally binding file-name-handler-alist to nil is a big win — in my case, it sped things up by 50%.

In my case, I set calendar-latitude and calendar-longitude by geocoding my address — geocoding is done by calling the Google Maps API. The geocoding API is plenty fast that you normally dont notice it — but it was adding anywhere from 1–3 seconds during startup. Since my address doesn't change that often, I updated module gmaps to use a memoized version. My address is set via Customize, and the geocoded lat/long is saved to disk automatically.

1. Emacs Speed What got it all started.
2. file-name-handler-alist The article that gave me the most useful tip of them all.

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