How to see which plugins are making Vim slow?

I have found it helpful to print all Vim activity to a file by starting Vim with the -V option:

vim -V12log

This provides the maximum verbosity (level 12) and outputs it to the file log. You can then perform some Vim actions which you know to be slow, and then see which functions/mappings are being called internally.

You can use built-in profiling support: after launching vim do

:profile start profile.log
:profile func *
:profile file *
" At this point do slow actions
:profile pause
:noautocmd qall!

(unlike quitting noautocmd is not really required, it just makes vim quit faster).

Note: you won’t get information about functions there were deleted before vim quit.

I found another very helpful vim buildin method to show the exactly timing messages while loading your .vimrc.

vim --startuptime timeCost.txt timeCost.txt

Please run:

:help --startuptime

in VIM to get more information.

It could be a plugin or the syntax highlighting; try a :syntax off when this happens and see whether Vim instantly gets faster.

With plugins, a "general slowness" usually comes from autocommands; a :autocmd lists them all. Investigate by killing some of them via :autocmd! [group] {event}. Proceed from more frequent events (i.e. CursorMoved[I]) to less frequent ones (e.g. BufWinEnter).

If you can somewhat reliably reproduce the slowness, a binary search might help: Move away half of the files in ~/.vim/plugin/, then the other, repeat in the set that was slow.

If you really need to look under the hood, get a Vim version that has the :profile command enabled. (Not the vanilla BIG Windows version, but the one that ships with Cygwin has it; also, self-compiling is quite easy under most distros.)