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

Emacs's PROBLEM file says:

*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.

This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
full qualified domain name, FQDN.  You should have your FQDN in the
/etc/hosts file, something like this:

127.0.0.1   localhost
129.187.137.82  nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04

The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.

This "slow startup" typically comes from a timeout, and 30s sounds about right.

As a side note: the DNS lookup that causes this slow down was considered important/useful back in the days where (almost) all machines had a static IP address. Nowadays the info gathered this way does not justify the effort, so starting with Emacs-25, Emacs does not perform this DNS lookup, so this problem should simply not exist any more.