emacs slow with large threads

[Landry, Walter]

Hello Everyone,

I am using the emacs frontend to notmuch.  It has mostly been a pleasant
experience, but I am having a problem with large threads.  Essentially,
when I try to view a large thread, the machine locks up for many
minutes.  The problem seems very similar to these posts.

  https://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2013/014811.html
  https://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2015/020379.html

I tried turning off html rendering by setting mm-text-html-renderer to
nil.  That helped, but it is still taking at least 10 minutes to render
a thread.  I killed it when I ran out of patience.

The thread has 231 messages, and running

  notmuch show thread:000000000000d637 | wc -l

shows that it is 46918 lines long.  Running that on the command line is
fast, taking 0.123 seconds.  As a comparison, I tried opening the thread
with astroid.  It was not instantaneous, but it only took about 3
seconds.

I am guessing that the emacs mode is trying to process the result.  I
can work around this a bit by opening individual messages with "C-u RET"
instead of "RET".  But then I lose context.

Is there anything else I can do to make this work?

Thanks,
Walter Landry