Profiling vim startup time

Question

I've got alot of plugins enabled when using vim which I've collected over the years. I'm a bit fed up with how long vim takes to start now so I'd like to profile it's startup and see which of the many plugins I have are responsible. Is there anyway to profile vim startup or script running? Ideally I'd like to know how long vim spent in each vim script it loads.

Answer 1

If you're loading your plugins from a .vimrc file, what you could do is put a q on some line part way through the file to make it quit so you can use a process timer, like the unix time command. More thoroughly, this would look like:

1. backup existing .vimrc file
2. comment out all but a select number of plugins
3. insert a q line
4. call time vim repeteadly and average
5. restore backup

This is not elegant but I think it will get the job done.

Answer 2

You could run vim -V, pipe the output through a utility that adds timestamps and analyze the output. This command lines does this, e.g.:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -MTime::HiRes=time -ne 'print time, ": ", $_' | tee vilog

You might have to blindly type :q to get back to your prompt. Afterwards, you should find the file vilog in your current directory with hires timestamps at the beginning of each line.

If you can do with a granularity of a second, you can do this:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -ne 'print time, ": ", $_' | tee vilog

Answer 3

I refined the vim -V solution by Manni to show the delta time:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -MTime::HiRes=time -ne '$a = time unless defined $a; print time - $a, ": ", $_' | tee vilog

Answer 4

If you're using Vim 7.2.269 or later, then there's the --startuptime option you can use.

vim --startuptime=vim.log