Profiling and Accidental Learning

My sacred emacs is taking 13 seconds to start up!

This is not good, I have read somewhere about a built in profiler, and indeed when I ivy complete for a function profiler I find a plethora of options. profiler-start looks good, and with a little intersearching it all seems simple enough, except it looks as though it probably won’t solve my start up problems but will profile any commands I execute in emacs, so would solve for example an issue I had in the past with deft starting up.

I found a good option in esup, added the following to my .emacs :

(use-package esup
  :ensure t
  ;; To use MELPA Stable use ":pin melpa-stable",
  :pin melpa)

initially it didn’t work and gave me the following:

error in process sentinel: Wrong type argument: (or eieio-object class), nil, obj

but with a little research I managed to fix it with adding the following to my .emacs :

;; Work around a bug where esup tries to step into the byte-compiled
;; version of `cl-lib', and fails horribly.
(setq esup-depth 0)

and on running esup I get a nice report generated with the top offenders in my .emacs org-download was at the top:

.emacs:36  0.264sec   22%
(use-package org-download)

I like the way it runs up a separate child emacs session to test out the timing on the init file and then generated a report.

But overall the total time was 1.166sec there must be something else going on here. At which point I twigged and remembered that as I have (desktop-save-mode 1) set it means that all my buffers are reloaded on a new emacs startup, once I cleaned all these out, which I do from time to time it only took a couple of second to run up!

I think my lesson from this exercise is the amazing possibilities of learning through investigation and trying to fix issues and emacs is so configurable and so much fun to play around with I find myself learning more and more!