Re: do plugins affect performance?

Aside from startup time (especially if plugins don't use autoload), unused plugins should barely affect speed. But I'll note that it's pretty straightforward to profile vim to see what is taking time and clock cycles, in case you want to actually examine one or more suspicious plugins and determine what is causing slowness.

- DLD

On Thursday, January 7, 2021 at 1:49:40 PM UTC-5 Salman Halim wrote:

I was thinking the same thing: unless a plugin

has expensive autocommands that trigger often, but do nothing (CursorHold, for example), the only time performance hit should be upon initial startup when it's loaded.

It is possible that a plugin defines mappings with ambiguity and that introduces a timeout for Vim to figure out which mapping to use, but that delay isn't caused by the hardware not being able to keep up. I occasionally get mapping collisions in new plugins that conflict with unused plugins or unused parts of plugins, which would be a good reason to only keep the plugins you actually use. 

Salman

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021, 13:30 Charles Campbell <camp...@drchip.org> wrote:

I agree with gevisz: a plugin could have an impact on performance even
if not used. Just imagine that there's a busy wait loop that fires up
when the plugin is loaded -- it would just hog the machine (well, at
least a core).

Nonetheless, mostly what plugins do upon startup is:

   define functions
   define various mappings, commands

Vim, of course, does have to determine whether or not a given sequence
of symbols invokes a command, function, or mapping. There are a number
of ways to do this; some are log-m (m=qty characters in the string,
n=qty of strings), so adding in extra mappings, commands, and functions
should be negligible cost in time.

So, I would not expect unused plugins to exact a performance cost.

Regards,
Chip Campbell

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