Re: Performance 21.3.50 W2K

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    1. If the file size is greater than a given size (user customizable) and
    if it has non-ascii chars, we should prompt whether to use
    'find-file-literally instead of 'find-file.

This might be a good idea for very large files.  We could add a
variable to specify the threshold for this, release Emacs with that
threshold set as very large, then ask users to try smaller values
and say if they prefer those.

    1. Come up with buffered reading for large files. Read a portion of the
    file, display it and repeat this till the file is completely read. 

This would be a good feature, but doing it in a general way would be
very difficult.

The simplest variant of this idea would be to call redisplay in the
middle of inserting the file contents.  Emacs would not be able to
execute any commands until it finishes reading the file, but you could
at least see the beginning of the file.  That might not be too hard.
Of course, it would only help to a limited extent.