Using helm (e.g. helm-find-files) when working on huge directories

[Ribonous]

There is one folder that I access frequently that has close to 200K entries (subfolders). I noticed that if I use Emacs with (helm-mode 1) access to this folder is painfully slow.

For example, find-file (C-x C-f) or helm-find-file (C-x c C-x C-f) take a long time (~2-4 secs) to populate my list. Since I access this folder so often, this eventually becomes unbearable.

In regular Emacs this is not a problem, since I can just directly type the path that I want to open.

My question is, what options can I tune in Helm to speed up the access to a super large folder?  If there aren't any that help with this, what advice would you give for my situation?

Thanks,

Lukas

[Thierry Volpiatto]

Ribonous <ribonu...@gmail.com> writes:

> There is one folder that I access frequently that has close to 200K entries
> (subfolders). I noticed that if I use Emacs with (helm-mode 1) access to
> this folder is painfully slow.
>
> For example, find-file (C-x C-f)

It is related to helm-mode.

> or helm-find-file (C-x c C-x C-f)

It is not related to helm-mode.

> take a long time (~2-4 secs) to populate my list. Since I access this
> folder so often, this eventually becomes unbearable.

With helm-find-files, I have not this problem (The access is instant)
in e.g /usr/share or /usr/lib (but they live in a ssd drive).
IIRC on my old laptop with a meca drive only, the access to such
directories was not instant but really usable and never unbearable like
you say.

> In regular Emacs this is not a problem, since I can just directly type the
> path that I want to open.
>
> My question is, what options can I tune in Helm to speed up the access to a
> super large folder?

Have you tried to limit the highlighting number limit of candidates
with:

helm-ff-maximum-candidate-to-decorate

Also note that access to disk may be slower on a laptop when you are on
battery depending of your power settings.

> If there aren't any that help with this, what advice would you give
> for my situation?

If your huge directory is a git repo, you could use helm-ls-git.el.

> Thanks,
>
> Lukas

--
Thierry
Get my Gnupg key:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 59F29997

[Ribonous]

Thanks a lot Thierry.

Lukas