[O] working with tables can be quite painful...

[Eric S Fraga]

Hello,

I am working with a table.  It has approximately 130 rows and 20 columns
so it's not huge but also not small.  Three columns are text but the
rest are all numbers with some degree of sparsity.  Instrumenting org
while working on this table, manipulating the entries in just one row, I
get the following:

| Function                 | calls | elapsed time | average time |
|--------------------------+-------+--------------+--------------|
| org-cycle                |    20 | 41.550963140 | 2.0775481570 |
| org-table-next-field     |    20 | 41.544266727 | 2.0772133363 |
| org-table-align          |     5 | 41.470595702 | 8.2941191404 |
| org-mode-flyspell-verify |    52 | 1.0647362189 | 0.0204756965 |
| org-do-latex-and-related |    21 | 0.6656267140 | 0.0316965101 |
| org-element-at-point     |   125 | 0.6356939890 | 0.0050855519 |
| org-element--parse-to    |   125 | 0.6086256940 | 0.0048690055 |
| org-element--cache-put   |  1399 | 0.4963533770 | 0.0003547915 |

>From this, it would seem that the table align function is killing the
performance.  8 seconds per call?  On an 8 core Intel(R) Core(TM)
i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz... so not my wee Pandora where I expect
slowness!

This is with a not quite up to date org.  I'm avoiding upgrading as I am
preparing material for teaching which starts soon and I don't want to
run into issues due to changes in org... so I apologise if things have
changed recently. This performance issue has existed for quite some time
now, however.

Any suggestions on speeding things up?

Thanks,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.94.1, Org release_8.3.5-1070-g190476