If your program is working correctly, but not fast enough, and you want to make it run more quickly or efficiently, the first thing to do is profile your code so that you know where it spends most of the execution time. If you find that one particular function is responsible for a significant portion of the execution time, you can start looking for ways to optimize that piece.
Emacs has built-in support for this. To begin profiling, type
M-x profiler-start. You can choose to sample CPU usage
periodically (cpu), when memory is allocated (memory),
or both. Then run the code you’d like to speed up. After that, type
M-x profiler-report to display a summary buffer for CPU usage
sampled by each type (cpu and memory) that you chose to profile. The
names of the report buffers include the times at which the reports
were generated, so you can generate another report later on without
erasing previous results. When you have finished profiling, type
M-x profiler-stop (there is a small overhead associated with
profiling, so we don’t recommend leaving it active except when you are
actually running the code you want to examine).
The profiler report buffer shows, on each line, a function that was called, preceded by how much CPU resources it used in absolute and percentage terms since profiling started. If a given line has a ‘+’ symbol to the left of the function name, you can expand that line by typing RET, in order to see the function(s) called by the higher-level function. Use a prefix argument (C-u RET) to see the whole call tree below a function. Pressing RET again will collapse back to the original state.
Press j or mouse-2 to jump to the definition of a function at point. Press d to view a function’s documentation. You can save a profile to a file using C-x C-w. You can compare two profiles using =.
The elp library offers an alternative approach, which is useful
when you know in advance which Lisp function(s) you want to profile.
Using that library, you begin by setting elp-function-list to
the list of function symbols—those are the functions you want to
profile. Then type M-x elp-instrument-list RET nil RET to arrange for profiling those functions. After running
the code you want to profile, invoke M-x elp-results to
display the current results. See the file elp.el for more
detailed instructions. This approach is limited to profiling
functions written in Lisp, it cannot profile Emacs primitives.
You can measure the time it takes to evaluate individual Emacs Lisp
forms using the benchmark library. See the function
benchmark-call as well as the macros benchmark-run,
benchmark-run-compiled, and benchmark-progn in
benchmark.el. You can also use the benchmark command
for timing forms interactively.
To profile Emacs at the level of its C code, you can build it using the
--enable-profiling option of configure. When Emacs
exits, it generates a file gmon.out that you can examine using
the gprof utility. This feature is mainly useful for
debugging Emacs. It actually stops the Lisp-level M-x
profiler-… commands described above from working.