I’m using Desktop Save Mode so that Emacs knows to open again all the buffers I’ve been using. That goes quite well with how often I start Emacs, that is once a week or once a month. Now, M-x ibuffer last line is as following:

718 buffers         19838205                  668 files, 15 processes

That means that at startup, Emacs will load that many files. In order not to have to wait until it’s done doing so, I’ve setup things this way:

;; and the session
(setq desktop-restore-eager 20
      desktop-lazy-verbose nil)
(desktop-save-mode 1)
(savehist-mode 1)

Problem is that it’s still slow. An idea I had was to use the readahead tool that allows reducing some distributions boot time. Of course this tool is not expecting the same file format as emacs-desktop uses. Still, converting is quite easy is some awk magic. Here’s the result:

;;; dim-desktop.el --- Dimitri Fontaine
;;
;; Allows to prepare a readahead file list from desktop-save

(require 'desktop)

(defvar dim-desktop-file-readahead-list
  "~/.emacs.desktop.readahead"
  "*Where to save the emacs desktop `readahead` file list")

(defvar dim-desktop-filelist-command
  "gawk -F '[ \"]' '/desktop-.*-buffer/ {getline; if($4) print $4}' %s"
  "Command to run to prepare the readahead file list")

(defun dim-desktop-get-readahead-file-list (&optional filename dir)
  "get the file list for readahead from dekstop file in DIR, or ~"
  (with-temp-file (or filename dim-desktop-file-readahead-list)
    (insert
     (shell-command-to-string
      (format dim-desktop-filelist-command
	      (expand-file-name desktop-base-file-name (or dir "~")))))))

;; This will not work because the hook is run before to add the buffers into
;; the desktop file.
;;
;;(add-hook 'desktop-save-hook 'dim-desktop-get-readahead-file-list)

;; so instead, advise the function
(defadvice desktop-save (after desktop-save-readahead activate)
  "Prepare a readahead(8) file for the desktop file"
  (dim-desktop-get-readahead-file-list))

(provide 'dim-desktop)

The awk construct getline allows to process the next line of the input file, which is very practical here (and in a host of other situations). Now that we have a file containing the list of files Emacs will load, we have to tweak the system to readahead those disk blocks. As I’m currently using KDE again, I’ve done it thusly:

% cat ~/.kde/Autostart/readahead.emacs.sh
#! /bin/bash

# just readahead the emacs desktop files
# this file listing is maintained directly from Emacs itself
readahead ~/.emacs.desktop.readahead

So, well, it works. The files that Emacs will need are pre-read, so at the time the desktop really gets to them, I see no more disk activity (laptops have a led to see that happening). But the desktop loading time has not changed…