Unusably slow on Cygwin

[strugee]

I have zsh-syntax-highlighting enabled via Antigen, and on Cygwin, it's unusably slow. I think this might be a recent regression, but I'm not sure.

% zsh --version
zsh 5.0.6 (x86_64-unknown-cygwin)

I'd provide more information, but I'm not sure where to begin debugging this. Please let me know what I can do, and I'll try to add some information.

[Forethinker]

I am seeing this issue as well, did you find any solution around this? For now I downgraded to 5.0.2 and things seem okay.

[strugee]

Nope. Sorry.

[ferenczy]

Is it really better with Zsh 5.0.2? I have also 5.0.6. The only case when it's bothering me is pasting of text. With highlighting enabled, it pastes ca 3 characters per second, which is really bad, if you need to paste for example 50 characters. But it's bad to wait even for 20 characters. And I have very powerful machine.

It would be nice if it's possible to evaluate text after pasting is finished and not after each character. Or for example after some time (0.5 second) without typing / pasting.

[ferenczy]

@Forethinker: I have tried Zsh 5.0.2 and performance of zsh-syntax-highlighting is the same. How did it help to you? I'm checking performance by pasting text to the command line. Pasting of 25 characters takes more than 4 seconds with both 5.0.2 and 5.0.6.

I have created a pull request which address this issue. It's rather a draft than a solution, so if anyone is interested, feel free to improve it. Pasting is instant with my patch, but you have to press some key (for example right arrow, which does nothing on the end of line) to highlight pasted text sometimes.

It basically measures time between two key presses and if it's less than configured period (for example when pasting text), it doesn't run highlighter. So if each character of the clipboard content is pasted under that limit, whole pasted text is not highlighted. Therefore you have to press any key after pasting to highlight it.

[strugee]

@ferenczy what OS are you on? I think we're talking about separate issues. On Cygwin, this package is slow for me even when I'm typing.

Also, some more information: it appears that this may be triggering a bug in something else. When I SSH into my Debian Jessie server, which has this enabled, everything works just fine. It's only on a local shell that it's slow. Maybe it has something to do with Cygwin's zsh build?

[Ardakilic]

+1 , I'm using babun on Windows 8.1 pro x64, it comes with zsh 5.06, and after enabling it's quite slow for me, too. Pasting 200 character takes more than 5 seconds. Typing is also quite slow.

[strugee]

I can no longer reproduce this.

% zsh --version
zsh 5.0.8 (x86_64-unknown-cygwin)
% cd ~/.antigen/repos/*zsh-syntax-highlighting*
% git rev-parse HEAD
3dc574190071ef59054f6d693132410b37aa3ae4

How about other people? If nobody pipes up, I'll close this issue.

[strugee]

I should mention that I recently freshly installed Cygwin on a fresh Windows box.

[tylercal]

Still terribly slow for me:

> zsh --version
zsh 5.0.8 (x86_64-unknown-cygwin)

Used a downloaded version with latest commit a8afbdf and also tried the release from Sept 2014 @strugee mentioned (3dc5741)

[Kleptine]

Horribly slow on a fresh installation of Windows 10 + Babun. Everything installed today.

Typing just feels awful. Anyone have a workaround?

[danielnehrig]

I expirenced the same problems but if i go into bash and then back to zsh it gets faster

[danielshahaf]

@inet-pwnZ That's interesting. Could you clarify what you mean? Do you mean chsh -s bash && chsh -s zsh or bash -c zsh or something else?

[danielnehrig]

If i boot up my terminal for the first time its very slow after it is done loading i write "ls" and it takes very long to respond then i enter "bash" and then back to "zsh" then everything works fast even if i restart the terminal

ls
bash
zsh

[gajus]

Has there been any investigation into this?

~ zsh --version
zsh 5.1.1 (x86_64-unknown-cygwin)

I have all plugins disabled.

Of interest to note, that execution of command is fine, e.g.

~ time date
Wed, Apr 20, 2016 11:57:04 AM
date  0.01s user 0.08s system 47% cpu 0.196 total

The slowness comes from the time it takes to get back control of the input after a command is executed, i.e. typing a command (e.g. date) gives an instant result, but then it takes ~300ms until terminal accepts new input.

[gajus]

For the record, it works perfectly fine with oh-my-zsh disabled.