Re: [patch suggestion] Mitigating the poor Emacs performance on huge org files: Do not use overlays for PROPERTY and LOGBOOK drawers

[Karl Voit]

Hi Ihor,

* Ihor Radchenko <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> So far, I came up with the following partial solution searching and
> showing hidden text.
>
> (defun org-find-text-property-region (pos prop)
> (define-advice isearch-search-string (:after (&rest _) put-overlay)
> (defun org-restore-invisibility-specs (&rest _)
> (add-hook 'post-command-hook #'org-restore-invisibility-specs)
> (defun org-flag-region (from to flag spec)
> (defun org-unfontify-region (beg end &optional _maybe_loudly)

After a couple of hours working with these patches, my feedback is
very positive. Besides some visual glitches when creating a new
heading with org-expiry-insinuate activated (which automatically
adds :CREATED: properties), I could not detect any side-effect so
far (will keep testing).

The visual glitch looks like that:

:PROPERTIES:X:CREATED:  [2020-05-04 Mon 18>54]
X

... with "X" being my character that symbolizes collapsed content.
The way it looked without the patch was a simple collapsed property
drawer.

To me, this is acceptable considering the huge performance gain I
got.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I can't remember where I had this way of
working within my large Org files[3] since ages.

>> Anyway, the real fix should come from Emacs itself. There are ways to
>> make overlays faster. These ways have already been discussed on the
>> Emacs devel mailing list, but no one implemented them. It is a bit sad
>> that we have to find workarounds for that.
>
> I guess that it is a very old story starting from the times when XEmacs
> was a thing [1]. I recently heard about binary tree implementation of
> overlays (there should be a branch in emacs git repo) [2], but there was
> no update on that branch for a while. So, I do not have much hope on
> Emacs implementing efficient overlay access in the near future. (And I
> have problems with huge org files already).

I can not express how this also reflects my personal situation.

> [1] 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/planetemacs/comments/e9lgwn/history_of_lucid_emacs_fsf_emacs_schism/
> [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-12/msg00323.html

[3] https://karl-voit.at/2020/05/03/current-org-files

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