GNU bug report logs - #4287
reducing emacs size by more frequent garbage-collect calls in loadup.el

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Message #3 received at submit <at> emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com (full text, mbox):

From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann <at> ics.uci.edu>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>
Subject: reducing emacs size by more frequent garbage-collect calls in loadup.el
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

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