faster emacs startup, can I postpone package loading?

[mitchell_laks]

Hi,

I run debian and use emacs as my editor. On  some systems I have many
packages that customize emacs for their own purposes. These packages
include such things as eieio, macsyma cedet-common tex etc.

On some of these systems the load process significantly slows down the
boot process. While emacs on some systems is immediately there, here it
can take 4 seconds (gasp).
On other systems I have with less 'crud' (extraordinary software that I
do use occassionally), it comes up faster than a rabbit. As fast as
(shudder) vi. (I wrote my thesis using vi, a long ways ago, and don't
want to go that way again).

(I originally was going to write that it takes 10 seconds to boot, but
I solved that problem when I realized that emacs was doing a reverse
dns lookup  and it went down to 4 seconds as soon as I added the
workstation ip address itself to the /etc/hosts file).

When I look in the *Messages* buffer I see the following load list (see
below).

Now all this is by virtue of Debian packaging adding loads. I did not
really modify the .emacs file too much.

Is there some simple way that I can make all this (exciting) loading
take place in the few seconds after I get my prompt and am working on
my files?

Note that I am a lisp newbie, I can barely car, cdr and setq, though I
own SICP, Lispcraft, On Lisp, Common Lisp and even once printed out the
gnu emacs-lisp manual.... :)

Thanks!

Mitchell Laks

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