Emacs Benchmarks

How fast is Emacs itself? How fast are the primitives? How fast is the elisp interpreter?

This project is an attempt to get some hard numbers.

Usage

benchmarks/ contains elisp benchmark script. Each file documents what it is testing. Every script ends by printing a computed value, to confirm that Emacs has actually done what we expected.

$ for f in benchmarks/*; do echo $f; time emacs --quick --script $f; done

Use of Emacs for scripting is based on this blog post.

TODO

• bytecode performance metrics
• see if performance is equivalent in an emacs GUI
• see if loading site-lisp affects performance

Contributing

Please file bugs and report areas where you find Emacs is too slow!