emacs / vim - time taken to open threads

[Matthew Lear]

Hi all,
Continuing my journey with notmuch... It has been very enjoyable so far.
One thing which has been puzzling me greatly is the time it can take to
notmuch-show a moderately sized thread (eg one with 32 messages with a
three to four sentence paragraph per message - approx 32 x 35kB with
some small attachments). Opening the thread using notmuch-show in emacs
takes about six seconds. If I build the ruby bindings and load up
notmuch in vim or gvim, opening the same thread takes less than a
second. It's *loads* quicker.

I've rolled back and rolled forwards the version of emacs in my gentoo
installation (various versions of 24) and built it without all available
options, run it bare bones in X and without X. The behaviour is the
same. I've also stripped back my .emacs to nothing more than pulling in
notmuch.el but there is no change in the behaviour.

I've read some posts about emacs hanging when opening emails due to
attached files, but that was quite a while ago (pre 24). Some of the
emails in my thread have photos (a few hundred kB), others have URLs but
this shouldn't slow emacs down.

Despite being a vi guy for years, I prefer the emacs interface to
notmuch and really like what it provides. I'm sticking with it but there
is clearly a problem and I'd like to solve it. It's annoying when you
know that something isn't working as well as it should be.

Is it known that emacs is slower with notmuch or do you think I have
some kind of build / environment problem? Or could it be due to some of
the email content (doubtful) or something else such as encoding etc?

Cheers,
--  Matt