It seems you are right - it does load faster 2nd time, and the HD does
spin a lot.
I played a bit with hdparm utility to tune my HD, and found that
enabling DMA allowed me to boost HD read performance from 4Mb/s to
11.2 Mb/s (as reported by hdparm -t). Now my emacs loads in about 2
secs, but xemacs still takes forever - looks like I'll have to play
with hdparm some more...
Thanks!
Sasha
> :~>It doesn't seem to be related to X or window managers -even after
> :~>telinit 3; emacs takes about the same time. Memory/CPU indicators
> :~>(under Gnome) show memory 95% full, no swapping; CPU usage jumps
> :~>to 20% first second after issuing 'emacs' command, then drops down to
> :~>zero for the next 3-4 secs, then jumps to 100% and after this emacs
> :~>finally emerges.
> :~>
> :~>For comparison: on my office machine (Pentium 450Mhz, 128 meg RAM,
> :~>RH6.0) emacs starts in under one second.
>
> It could be your HD. If you start xemacs, stop it and start again, does it
> start much faster? If yes - it is certainly your HD. First time it has to
> read the stuff from the HD, but the second time it has it buffered...
> (Listen to your HD - on first start it schould be working hard to load
> emacs, but not on the second)
>
> cu
> Denis
