Subject: reducing emacs size by more frequent garbage-collect calls in loadup.el

From: Dan Nicolaescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:41:58 -0700 (PDT)

As the Subject says, replacing each `load' line in loadup.el with 
`load' + `garbage-collect' will reduce the size of the stripped emacs
binary: (.7 is before, .8 is after the change)

$ ls -l emacs-23.1.50.8 emacs-23.1.50.7
-rwx------ 1 dann dann 6722788 Jul 24 14:20 emacs-23.1.50.8*
-rwx------ 1 dann dann 6857956 Jul 24 14:20 emacs-23.1.50.7*

$ size  emacs-23.1.50.8 emacs-23.1.50.7
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
1883659 4833256       0 6716915  667df3 emacs-23.1.50.8
1883659 4968424       0 6852083  688df3 emacs-23.1.50.7

so we get about 2% reduction by doing something very simple and safe... 

[This happens because loading multiple files generate more garbage that
can be collected, but it is not returned to the OS, so it appears in
the dumped image].

See the discussion on this topic on emacs-devel:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/113176