Emacs daemon vs plain startup: which cuts resource cost for occasional editing sessions

Goal

I want to run Emacs on a small VPS where it is only used a few times per day for short editing sessions. The aim is to keep both startup latency and resident memory low without giving up my existing init configuration, which loads a moderate set of packages.

Constraints and uncertainty

Two documented approaches seem relevant: running Emacs as a persistent server with emacs --daemon and connecting via emacsclient, versus keeping per-invocation startup but trimming the init file with lazy loading (for example use-package with deferred :config). I am unsure how these interact for a low-traffic workload: a daemon trades a constant RSS footprint for near-instant client startup, while lazy loading reduces per-start cost but still pays it on every launch.

I also use desktop-save-mode, and I am unclear whether session restore meaningfully adds I/O cost in either setup, or whether it should be disabled for this pattern of use.

Questions

• For a workload of only a few short sessions per day, does the daemon's persistent memory footprint typically outweigh the repeated startup cost it eliminates, or is plain startup with lazy loading the cheaper option?
• Are there documented cases where deferring packages breaks functionality that my init implicitly depends on, and how can I detect that before committing to it?
• Does desktop-save-mode behave differently under a daemon (restoring once) versus repeated plain startups, in a way that should influence the choice?