Yeah, the way I set read-process-output-max (by reading /proc/sys/fs/pipe-max-size) is probably GNU/Linux-only. The two main ways to reduce startup times are:

Yeah, the way I set read-process-output-max (by reading /proc/sys/fs/pipe-max-size) is probably GNU/Linux-only. The two main ways to reduce startup times are: 1. Don't load too much at startup, use use-package's :defer keyword where ever it makes sense. 2. Set gc-cons-threshold to a very large value during initialisation and turn it back down again once everything's loaded. That said, most-positive-fixnum is probably overkill and I should look for a way to reliably set it to half of my PC's RAM. A less important third way to reduce startup times would be to byte compile everything (possibly even the early-init.el, init.el, and custom.el files, although that does mean you need to recompile whenever you change anything), but that doesn't gain you much.