From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>
Subject: Re: Largest org file you have + performance
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:31:17 -0500
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To: "jiangzuoyan@gmail.com" <jiangzuoyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Org Mode <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>

"jiangzuoyan@gmail.com" <jiangzuoyan@gmail.com> writes:

> My largest org file is QuanSongCi.org, contains ci poetry of Song
> dynasty, about 6MB size.
>
> Editing in emacs is very slow, save needs to wait about
> minutes.=C2=A0convert to html needs to wait about minutes, too. So,
> sometimes, sed like tools is preferred to do editing and converting.

Thanks for these details. I can report similar experiences with large files.

As far as I understand, large org-mode buffers are slow because there
are many overlays, which (unlike text properties), don't scale well:

(info "(elisp) Overlays")

This is right now an inescapable limitation of org-mode, since
outline-mode relies on overlays.

There was brief talk on emacs-dev of rewriting text-properties so that
outline-mode could use them instead of overlays, but I do not believe
the proposal was pursued further:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/131304

Best,
Matt