If one is looking to improve Emacs performance, I would recommend checking out gccemacs https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html insteald, as guilemacs has stalled. gccemacs has been merged into the main emacs branch and works by compiling Elisp into dynamically loadable binaries. The performance speedups are very promising, with up to 30x speed improvements over standard byte code. I've been using it as my default emacs and it's been working very well. No crashes and Emacs is finally not slow! Now all Emacs needs is preemptive multi-threading!