Emacs takes unbelievably long to start

Question

Yesterday, I :q\'d Vim to try Emacs for a while. I\'ve started using Elisp (which is a hundred times better than VimScript), but even when I first installed it

Answer 1

I had a smilar problem with emacs taking about 15 seconds for startup. In my case the reason was a DNS timeout. For some reason, with my dormitory DNS, a failed reverse lookup (host 127.0.0.1) takes about 10 seconds. Replacing the DNS server by the google nameserver (8.8.8.8) produces an almost instant "not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)" response. At the same time, emacs's startup time went down to less than 2 seconds. Thanks @Stefan who pointed me into the direction of DNS problems.

Edit: adding the google nameserver as additional NS in Network Manager also does the job. (i.e. when your resolv.conf has the NSs in this order:

nameserver a.b.c.d
nameserver 8.8.8.8

)