I'd bet it's just your setup. I had one Emacs session run for almost a month straight—and that was with LSP mode running on a fairly large Elixir project. I only restarted it because I needed to restart the machine I was running it on. It was using barely over 300 MB of RAM. (Lots and lots of open buffers and whatnot.) That's not an unusual occurrence for me—and I'm not even running the native-comp branch yet!
FWIW, my Emacs init time (run `emacs-init-time`) is between 2–7 seconds, and I'm not doing anything particularly special to get that working.
I'd start out with a fresh .emacs config file and then add the packages you want with the excellent `use-package` macro, setting `:defer t` as much as possible. (Often this will be implicit if you have `:mode`, `:hook`, or `:bind` configured, if I'm not mistaken.)
It would be better if Emacs were less sensitive to how your config is setup, but alas, we live in a fallen world. You can also ask around on r/emacs and get some better tips than mine.
I basic used `:defer t` for a while (Doom Emacs lazy loaded under the hood), but when I switched to my own config I decided to just run it in daemon mode and use `:demand t` on everything. I didn't like pauses sometimes when opening a new file while it loaded a package.
Actually, I just checked my init time with that command, and it's ~2.5 seconds. I wouldn't call my config heavyweight, but it does have evil, lsp, vterm, ivy, magic, etc. I am using the native-comp branch though.
FWIW, my Emacs init time (run `emacs-init-time`) is between 2–7 seconds, and I'm not doing anything particularly special to get that working.
I'd start out with a fresh .emacs config file and then add the packages you want with the excellent `use-package` macro, setting `:defer t` as much as possible. (Often this will be implicit if you have `:mode`, `:hook`, or `:bind` configured, if I'm not mistaken.)
It would be better if Emacs were less sensitive to how your config is setup, but alas, we live in a fallen world. You can also ask around on r/emacs and get some better tips than mine.