Profile Emacs to see if there is any issues seems to be a common approach https://practical.li/spacemacs/install-spacemacs/troubleshooting.html#profiling-emacs

The scorched earth approach would be to backup your config and reinstall from scratch. Test without applying any of your own configuration and steadily add your customisations back in to see if there is an impact

Less drastic would be to remove any config and packages not needed. Also clean out the .cache files

Removing unused layers shouldn't make any difference, as its all lazy loaded. It could be possible that a package in a layer is causing problems. This package could be excluded by adding the package name to dotspacemacs-excluded-packages although this might break some functionality.

I added some font rendering optomisations to dotspacemacs/user-config but not sure if they made any real difference. https://github.com/practicalli/spacemacs.d/blob/live/init.el#L806-L825

If using MacOSX, then some versions of Emacs are not that fast when running Spacemacs. These seem to be the recommended versions https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/tree/develop#macos

A potentially significant change is to switch to Ivy for completion, rather than helm. I believe this is done by adding the ivy layer and removing the helm layer in the Spacemacs configuration layers. https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+completion/ivy/README.html Ivy is a sub-set of the features of helm, so you may or may not miss those features.

Oh, and of course, update Spacemacs code, your Spacemacs config against the template (`SPC f e D`) and get the latest packages (`SPC f e U`) to get the latest updates and improvements (but dont update when you are busy in the rare case that there is an issue) https://practical.li/spacemacs/install-spacemacs/update.html

Finally, use Emacs 28 with native compilation. This may speed things up or break things (or both)

I had a great speedup migrating from emacs27 (the std package in fedora 35) to emacs 28 (had to install an outside package)

Thanks a ton! I'm definitely going to try these ideas over the weekend.

Moving around my project has been sluggish and that's a mental drag i don't need.

ok wow. yea. i'm on 28 right now and it feels snapper. That or i'm just excited its Friday. time will tell i suppose.

I am curious to understand what is sluggish when moving around projects. What commands are used?

Nothing like a new installation to give a sense of speed 😁 All those newly downloaded and complied Emacs pages should help, even more so if the packages were natively compiled (something I haven't tried yet)

Just normal text movement (evil mode up down etc..) had delays i was noticing. I didn't run profiler and collect samples so I'm not sure how often it was happening or why. But 28 feels faster right out of the box for me. I used the snap from ubuntu which i read is natively compiled.