Hi, In a similar vein as the speedups of scanning for IDs that was made a while back, there now is a speedup for org publish as well. Soon to be pushed to code.orgmode.org (we're still using that, aren't we?) with commit aa0fa8c75.
The speedup is seen when scanning through files to decide if an existing cache can be used or not. A note on the topic, fwiw. Loading an Org mode file using find-file is very slow. So when there is a reason for looking through the content of Org mode files, or any file for that matter, and there is no reason for triggering hooks, consider instead inserting the content of the file in a delay-mode-hooks macro within a temporary buffer (using the with-temp-buffer macro). Example: *Instead of*: (find-file path-to-file) ;; do stuff (...) ;; clean up state (kill-buffer ...) *Consider*: (with-temp-buffer (delay-mode-hooks (insert-file-contents path-to-file) ;; do stuff (...))) Best Gustav