gvim rendering is slow

[Nicholas J Kreucher]

Binary package hint: vim

Rendering in gvim is very slow compared to previous Ubuntu releases. It's usable, but takes patience. I'm using vim/gvim 7.1.314-3ubuntu3.1 on Ubuntu 8.10.

Others have reported this same issue on a thread from the vim mailing list. Many solutions have been tried w/o success:
http://groups.google.com/group/vim_use/browse_thread/thread/dd1d8d9a799adf4a

From the thread, someone provided this benchmark script:
-- -- --
" Benchmark vim's redrawing speed
let i = 0
while i < 2000
  1
  redraw
  $
  redraw
  let i = i + 1
endwhile
qa!
-- -- --

I've run it with /etc/init.d/README as an input file (just to pick something consistent across Ubuntu machines):

$ time vim -u NONE -U NONE -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README
real 0m5.407s
user 0m0.568s
sys 0m0.048s

$ time gvim -u NONE -U NONE -f -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README
real 3m27.614s
user 0m11.685s
sys 0m0.312s

As you can see gvim is almost 40x slower then vim (running in gnome-terminal). You'd expect gvim to be slower then vim, but not by this much. Note, from the thread, not all users experience this huge difference. Some only report 2-3x slowdown, which I'd be very happy with at this point :)

I'm using the radeon X11 driver (open source) on a ThinkPad T42p, and do _not_ experience slow rendering in other apps (for example, gedit).

[Ted Reed (treed)]

I'm also experiencing this in Oneiric with vim 2:7.3.154+hg~74503f6ee649-2ubuntu3.

treed@treed-laptop:~$ time vim -u NONE -U NONE -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real 0m0.161s

treed@treed-laptop:~$ time gvim -u NONE -U NONE -f -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real 1m58.164s

I've got a Dell Precicion M4600 with an AMD FirePro. (lspci identifies it as being Whistler XT; AMD Radeon HD 6700M Series)

I'm using the fglrx driver.

Let me know other information is needed.

[Leon (leonbo)]

I'm having the same issue with gvim.

[Valentas (vk-registrator)]

Affects me too. But who cares? Everybody just cares about the impossible task of making the interface common between small smartphone screens and large monitors. I will use 10.04 as long as it lasts and then I will switch to some other distribution of Linux.

[Alan Robertson (alanr-unix)]

Very recently it became even slower with syntax highlighting on. I ran across it in this bug repository: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/36693 - and tried their suggested workaround, set regexpengine=1 which makes a huge difference - making it useful again.

[harish2704 (harish2704)]

Hi,
I too have the same problem.
When viewing a syntax highlighted file, page-up/down is slow. we could see re-rendering with eye. (I mean it is slow )
I noticed this issue after update from 12.04 -> 14.04.
I tried changing graphics drivers in xorg.conf
When I used 'fbdev' as driver, The problem doesn't exists but other graphics performance (such as compiz's work space switching) became slow. Also 'glxheads' didn't reported a correct 'GL_RENDERER' when I used fbdev.

using fglrx driver also fixed the same problem ( gvim's ). But I don't use fglrx because LCD backlight will not function with fglrx

[Mikael Strom (mikael-sesamiq)]

I'm having the same problem under VmWare Fusion. When resizing the window it takes at least 5 seconds to redraw the window.

I would really appreciate a workaround for this.

[Eric Jiang (erjiang)]

I am running VIM 7.4 on Ubuntu 14.04.4 and noticed that this problem only appeared *after* I switched to an AMD Radeon 7770 graphics card. Previously, with my Nvidia graphics card this problem did not exist.

I am running the fglrx-updates proprietary driver provided by the built-in "Additional drivers" tool (2:15.201-0ubuntu0.14.04.1).

[David Ho (davidkwho)]

I have the same issue with stock gvim 7.4 in Ubuntu 16.04(Xenial) running on VMWare 12.5.0 player with Windows 10 host.

Paging up/down (ctrl-b,ctrl-f) is very slow. Almost a 100x slow down.

dkwho@mumble:~$ time vim -u NONE -U NONE -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real 0m2.706s
user 0m0.624s
sys 0m1.196s
dkwho@mumble:~$ time gvim -u NONE -U NONE -f -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real 23m4.198s
user 0m32.328s
sys 0m5.904s

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner.

I'm setting the status of this bug to 'Incomplete' as it's not seen any activity for some time. If this is still an issue while using a currently maintained release of Ubuntu then please let us know which one(s) otherwise this bug report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for vim (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]