[O] What HW/SW issues influence org/Emacs performance?

[Karl Voit]

Hi!

I was thinking about which hardware and software attributes are the
most important factors for improving performance of Emacs and/or
Org-mode. The things I want to improve are 

(1) startup time of GNU Emacs (nice to have, no priority)

(2) using Org-mode agenda with approx. 20 Org-files 

(3) using agenda view including archive files 

The Org-mode files I regularly use in (2) contain 15,000 to 25,000
lines. The org_archive files contain more lines, three of them
40,000 to 130,000 lines with PROPERTY-drawers[1].

The biggest performance increase I'd like to see in moving in my
normal agenda (approx. 2-3s from one day to the next) and in my
agenda including the archive files (approx. 4-8s from one day to the
next). Usually, it is worth waiting :-)

On my system [3] I notice 100% load on one of my two cores when
Emacs is generating the agenda views. So I am not sure whether more
cores could increase the performance. Probably a faster CPU? Is
there something that makes Emacs use multiple cores in parallel?

We did some performance testing [1] for Memacs [2] but this only
tested a static situation on given platforms.

What do you think are the most important factors?

- CPU speed (of one core)
- type of CPU
- # CPU cores
- 32bit kernel vs. 64bit kernel
- faster I/O (through HDD->SSD or even faster SSD)
- choice of the file system (optimized for something? what?)
- operating system 
- possible ELISP optimizations (are there any besides compiling?)

Probably you already have an idea of a system which is designed to
be optimized for Emacs/Org-mode/Agenda ...? How does it look like?
:-)


... very curious about your thoughts ...

  1. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs/blob/master/docs/performance.org
  2. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs
  3. lenovo X200s, Core 2 Duo, SSD, Ubuntu 11.04, Gnome 2, GNU Emacs 23
-- 
Karl Voit