Vim itself is fine, but the plethora of plugins that a lot of people install can drag it down. Firefox has the same problem with extensions. And it's really not the fault of the base package. It's the plugin developers not doing due diligence, and it's the shear number of plugins making it impossible to test all combinations.
I'm not sure why you would open a log file with vim, but that's besides the issue. The issue is with 500 line files. Open one up in Sublime and one in Vim. If you only use Vim you'll never discover what it to means to have a performant editor (I've used Vim for ~10yrs and still regularly do).
I have no idea what you are talking about. I opened a 26,000 line file (no I don't want to talk about it). In vim it opened instantly and my scrolling was only limited by my key repeat rate. The scrolling isn't as smooth looking because vim doesn't animate the scrolling between lines. Sublime took 2 seconds to open the same file, and scrolling was smooth.
Maybe you are using to many vim plugins? I'll admit vim plugins are a real problem, the gui rendering desperately needs to be moved to its own thread.
I think there may be a possibility of the terminal itself being slow. Years ago when I used semi transparent terminals in something like enlightenment it was seriously noticeable when you were trying to scroll through text and it'd take a while to appear. Then I switched to using a simple terminal like rxvt and no transparency effects under ion2 and wow was it fast.
So, perhaps the answer is that it's not the editor nor plugins that's slow in the scenario. I think the line numbering even causes some slight slowdown. Anything that actually parses text will obviously cause a performance hit too. I notice slowdowns when I use visual selection modes combined with tricky combos of commands. Even without any of that, it might be possible that the version of vim is doing something stupid like what happens when you open up a 1GB log file in less and hit G. Haven't run an strafe to understand the fseek calls being made but that's been painful without exception in my experience. Perhaps that's what the poster was recalling.
You're right. Editing a large file with syntax coloring and vim slows to a crawl. I just can't get away from Vim though as it works so well in terminals.
This is mostly to do with the syntax matching, the regexes used for that, and thus ultimately also the implementation of the regex engine (which was more or less swapped in Vim 7.4). It bother me a bit too (but not too much). Perhaps it can be mended, we'll see :).
