Huge delays with gVim under Windows (Vim 8.2.5124)

[Christian J. Robinson]

At some point in the last ten patches a huge delay when starting gVim under windows was introduced. It appears to happen when reading the viminfo file:

413.000  006.000  006.000: sourcing $HOME\vimfiles\gvimrc
584.000  172.000: starting GUI
22975.000  22391.000: reading viminfo

Moving the viminfo aside fixes the problem only temporarily.

There are also big delays when running some plugins, such as ":Fern -drawer ." (https://github.com/lambdalisue/fern.vim)

--

Christian J. Robinson <hep...@gmail.com>

[Christian J. Robinson]

Follow up: Removing the search string history from the viminfo file speeds up startup significantly.

[Christian J. Robinson]

Turning off 'incsearch' speeds up Vim significantly both in loading the viminfo and when running ":Fern -drawer ."

[Bram Moolenaar]

Christian J. Robinson wrote:

> Turning off 'incsearch' speeds up Vim significantly both in loading the
> viminfo and when running ":Fern -drawer ."

I'm not sure what is going on here. The search strings in the viminfo
file should only fill the history. I cannot spot a relation with
something that might delay it. Only a redraw later might highlight
matches and use the last used search pattern.

What is ":Fern"? Does it install autocommands or other stuff that might
get triggered? Does it use ":redraw" perhaps?


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/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
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[Christian J. Robinson]

I tried it again with 'incsearch' off and it doesn't seem to change the speed of loading the viminfo file this time, but does affect Fern, which is a directory tree browser plugin.

I can still speed up loading the viminfo by removing the search history.

[Bram Moolenaar]

> I tried it again with 'incsearch' off and it doesn't seem to change the
> speed of loading the viminfo file this time, but does affect Fern, which is
> a directory tree browser plugin.
>
> I can still speed up loading the viminfo by removing the search history.

What if you only remove some entries? Perhaps it's a specific pattern
that is the problem. Either because it's slow to execute or there are
many matches.

--
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
-- Steve Hoflich, comp.lang.c++

[Christian J. Robinson]

I was unable to narrow it down to a single entry, but when I got it reduced to about five entries Vim stopped consistently slowing down when starting, making it an intermittent problem and probably extremely hard to isolate.