Comment 3 for bug 272443

In general there's no way to know that Emacs will be running for a particular user, and if one has to start it up, the delay is not avoided. It's nice to use emacsclient if a server happens to be running, but if it's not, then it's also nice if ALTERNATE_EDITOR is set to something that starts up fast. This is also useful for user accounts e.g. root that do not typically have applications running persistently.

A source build of emacs with all optional dependencies turned off starts up really fast; how about emacs-minimal?