In that case, I'll have to thank Bram for fixing my problem before I even asked him to do so! Thanks Gary, when I get a chance I'll download vim 7.
To those of you who provided links to work-around scripts etc., thank you for your help. If any of you are having trouble with large files I'd recommend doing what I _didn't_ do: make sure you're using the most recent version of vim before looking for other solutions. You may not need to reduce vim's capabilities in order to work with large files, either!
Cheers, Max On Tue, 22 May 2007, Gary Johnson wrote:
It turns out that this Red Hat installation also has vim 6.3.82 in /usr/bin/vim, so I tried that, too. /usr/bin/vim -u NONE two_million_lines 50% :.,$d 2 minutes 30 seconds! Eureka! According to the System Monitor CPU bar color, that was almost all User time, whereas with vim 7.1, it was a more balanced mix of User and Kernel time. (Kudos to Bram for such a performance improvement from vim 6 to 7!)
