Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiksi | Hacker News Reader

While this looks interesting, the main premise that oh-my-zsh is slow doesn't seem to hold up for me. I have a decently quick system, but nothing extreme and I don't notice much more lag with auto completion than I did with bash or fish. And I use auto completion excessively, and I'm not sparse with my oh-my-zsh plugins:

        plugins=(git golang archlinux catimg common-aliases compleat dircycle dirhistory sudo systemd urltools)

and also use other (non oh-my-zsh)"plugins" on top of that. Startup also isn't an issue and isn't any slower than it was before, and I'm using terminator which isn't exactly "light" by itself.

That being said, it looks interesting and I plan on fiddling around with it a bit.

View on HN

I haven't measured it directly but I definitely noticed a speedup when I switched to zsh, probably in the 0.2s-0.4s range. I probably actually slimmed down a bit, I don't have any plugins and my .zshrc is mostly aliases and path management.

yea oh-my-zsh isn't that slow, most people who think it is slow either have it misconfigured or have a really, really slow system

I ran a little comparison with both Oh-my-zsh and Prezto with roughly the same plugins: http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png. There's almost a 0.4s difference. In practice it makes for a noticeable 0.5-1s difference (with all the other stuff I have in my .zshrc).

I tested opening a new iTerm 2 tab on my late-2009 MBP and it takes 3.5-4s for the prompt to appear with oh-my-zsh enabled.

I would love to know what I've got misconfigured.

Definitely not a misconfiguration. I had the exact same issue after a certain period of time with every fresh install. The solution was switching to Prezto / fish (work / home respectively).

I have a fast system (Core i5, SSD), but tab completion is often very slow.

I just checked my `oh-my-zsh/plugins` directory, and there are 173 plugins, most of which I don't need.

Should I purge them?

Edit: browsing through the (oh-my-)zsh files, I can see that it only loads the plugins found in the `plugin` environment variable, so I guess the answer is no. The only plugin enabled is `git`.

My theme is also very basic (git and mercurial status).

Any advice to improve performance?

FWIW - There is a known issue with Apple's built-in-git and the Git oh-my-zsh plugin that really slows down prompt redraws. it has to do with the way the built in Git does repository polls, I believe. The solution is to install the latest Git client (preferably via Homebrew or whatever).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com