VIM: minibufexpl Performance Issues

I work in consulting, and this means that I frequently am asked to work on clients' machines. As part of my most recent engagement, I've done a bit of quick Python scripting to take care of some straightforward tasks. I initially installed my default VIM setup on this machine, but have run into some issues with it that I haven't experienced elsewhere.

One of the biggest is an overall slowness when opening, closing, saving, or even editing files. Sometimes it would take up to ten seconds to enter insert mode--totally unacceptable, and strange for an editor like VIM that was originally built to work over paltry network connections 20+ years ago.

As it turns out, like many corporate environments, very little is actually stored on the local machine. Almost every location that a user has write access to is a network drive that has been mapped to a drive letter. Also like many corporate networks and SAN setups, this one was overtaxed and slow. This, combined with one of the plugins I was using, the otherwise excellent minibufexpl, turned out to be causing the bulk of my issues, which I discovered after deactivating all of my plugins and reactivating them one by one. It seems that minibufexpl was traversing all of the open buffers every time a user performed an action. I found some chatter about this, and some proposed patches, but even after updating to the most recent version, the issue persisted.

In order to solve it, I unfortunately had to move away from minibufexpl for this machine, and replace it with BufExplorer. BufExplorer is not ideal for me--I can see how it would be helpful for editing dozens of files at once, but I rarely have more than ten or so open at a time, so minibufexpl's visual buffer representation is much better for me. However, this new setup does fix my issues and after remapping some keys in my vimrc--primarily binding <leader>b to :BufExplorer, it's almost as nice.

Hopefully, minibufexpl will fix this at some point in the future. Until then, its BufExplorer for me.