Up until recently kate worked ok with larger text files. but now its gotten really slow. I use kate to review log files and search for items that might indicate issues with the file that creates the log file.
My system is a fairly fast system with a i7-3960x processor and 32G of memory running on an M2. nvme (PCIe) I’m not running a lot at once so memory shouldn’t be an issue.
ps aux|wc -L
362
free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 31Gi 5.3Gi 1.4Gi 751Mi 24Gi 24Gi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
top:
load average: 0.47, 0.52, 0.63
By comparison gvim with the same large file is lightning quick, kwrite is really slow just like kate but i think they both use the same katepart libs.
Anything i can look at to speed up kate?
Can’t say I’m seeing that problem myself… how large is “larger text files” ?
I’m using Tumbleweed 20190601 with Kate: 19.04.1 on a less specified machine than yours, AMD Athlon Dual Core Processor 5600+, with only 3.8 GiB of RAM.
Opening, navigating through, and edit/find of, for example, “/var/log/messages-20190428”, a 4.5 MiB (4,669,654) plain text file, is not noticeably slow.
I’ve just concatenated several of my log files together to create a test file of approx 45M, still not seeing any real slowdown in kate apart from a slightly increased time taken to initially open the file.
Perhaps someone else will be able to confirm the problem…
Auto spell-checking and syntax highlighting (syntax should be “none” anyway for a plain text file) switched off?
Do the files in question have extremely long (several thousand) character lines? (That will slow kate, albeit not by much, although perceived speed is rather subjective).
Reading “very” large files with Kate will always require a delay when loading the file because the file must be completely loaded before the file is ready to be used. Anything related to acquiring the file… like file fragmentation, slow disk read, limited or restricted system resources, etc will affect how long to load the file.
Vim (and by extension gvim which is simply a frontend to vim) on the other hand is a <streaming> editor which means that the entire file does not have to completely load before using, only as much data as is needed to display is loaded at a time in bits and pieces.
So, perhaps the lesson is that if you do plenty of work with very large files, vim is the much better choice over other text editors.