Re: Unboxed package manager

[Lynn Winebarger]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 8:25 PM Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> wrote:
> >> my recollection is that installing ~1200 packages on those systems and
> >> "loading the world" took something like 5 minutes
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.  Do you mean that
> > byte-compiling and loading ~1200 packages takes about 5 minutes (which
> > would not be a problem per se AFAIU)?  Or that loading ~1200 already
> > byte-compiled packages takes about 5 minutes?  I took the file you
> > posted in bug#61004, modified it a bit to make it work with emacs -Q
> > (without external packages), and on my computer emacs -Q -l loadall.el
> > takes ~4.5 seconds.

You're right, my wording is very confusing.  The installation phase
took much, much longer than 5 minutes.  Loading the world, after
everything was byte-compiled, took about 5 minutes.  The 1200 packages
is just to give the number of directories prepended to the standard
load-path (it was more work to get those packages on those sandboxed
systems, hence "only" 1200, not the 2400+ I currently have on my
personal machine).  The number of libraries being loaded was closer to
4000, if I am recalling correctly (big if - this is ~9 months ago).
That was on fairly nice server hardware with SSDs, lots of RAM, and 24
cores.

I'm pretty sure the profiling report I filed for #61004 was generated
on a 2017-vintage laptop with a physically spinning disk for storage.
I don't think it would run emacs -Q -l loadall.el in 4.5 seconds on
that laptop, but with "-Q" you're taking out the main drag on the
startup time - having to search 1000-2000+ directories before getting
to the system directories where all the libraries in loadall.el will
actually be found.

Lynn