I use Spacemacs for Elixir programming and honestly, Emacs is slow, I would often type commands and then wait for it to complete. I think some reboot like Neovim did for Vim, could be beneficial as it is awesome editor, but it is just too slow to start and slow to use.

It might be that Spacemacs layer is adding additional complexity, and maybe going through Helm is the issue, I don't know, just it does take quite a bit for it to catch up. In Vim, you really are plowing through at the speed of thought.