After the startup pass, the slowest thing left in my Neovim was big log files. ~/log holds logs from 0.5 MB to 136 MB. The one I read most is 87 MB: 176,939 lines of about 500 characters, growing by about 2 lines a second while I read it. Opening it took 1.9 s before Neovim accepted a key. n, /, typing and <Esc> each stalled. Just reading the log while it grew froze the UI for about 11 of every 15 seconds.

No single plugin was to blame. Several separate pieces of work grew with the file, and one key mapping slowed n in every file. Medians of 5 runs in a real terminal:

Update 2026-10-17: the next pass looked at big log files, and found an nc mapping that made every n wait timeoutlen (500 ms) in every file. See Profiling Neovim on big logs.

After tmux and zsh, I looked at Neovim. My config has grown to 138 plugins on lazy.nvim and LazyVim. Almost every spec has an event, cmd or keys, so I assumed most of them were lazy. They weren’t: 89 of the 138 plugins loaded at startup.

None of the causes was a slow plugin. They were config mistakes that only show up once you ask lazy.nvim why each plugin loaded. I fixed them in two rounds: