Speeding Up Org Mode Publishing

I use org-mode to write my blog, and org-publish as my static site generator. While this system works great, I have found it to be really really slow. At this point, my blog has 39 posts, and org-publish will take upwards of a minute to re-generate all of them. To make matters worse, my workflow usually involves several re-generations per post. This gets old pretty quickly.

Since I am on a long train ride today, I decided to have a go at this problem. By the way, train rides and hacking on Emacs are a perfect match: Internet connectivity on trains is usually terrible, but Emacs is self-documenting, so internet access doesn't matter as much. It is sobering to work without an internet connection every once in a while, and Emacs is a perfect target for this kind of work.

One of the many things I learned on train rides is that Emacs in fact contains its own profiler! So, I ran (progn (profiler-start 'cpu) (org-publish "blog") (profiler-report)) to get a hierarchical list of where org-publish was spending its time. Turns out, most of its total run time was spent in functions relating to version control (starting with vc-).

Some package in my configuration set up vc-find-file-hook as part of find-file-hook. This means that every time org-publish opens a file, Emacs will look for the containing git repository and query its status. This takes forever! Worse yet, I don't even use vc-git at all. All my git interaction is done through magit.

But Emacs wouldn't be Emacs if this could not be fixed with a line or two of elisp. (remove-hook 'find-file-hooks 'vc-find-file-hook) will do the trick. This brought the runtime of org-publish down to 15 seconds. Yay for profiling and yay for Emacs!