w3m renderer is exceedingly slow on large message

w3m renderer is exceedingly slow on large message

[Sean McAfee]

I've recently started using Gnus to read my mail at work.  A few times a
day I get sent somewhat large HTML documents, typically around 800Kb in
size, containing mostly tables.  With mm-text-html-renderer set to w3m,
Gnus takes upwards of thirty seconds to render these messages.  Is that
supposed to happen?  If I save the message and apply the w3m program to
it on the command line, it finishes in less than a second.

I just now tried setting the renderer to w3m-standalone, and now the
large messages render quickly, but as plain text, without hyperlinks,
coloring, or fancy table borders.

Re: w3m renderer is exceedingly slow on large message

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Sean McAfee <eefacm@gmail.com> writes:

> With mm-text-html-renderer set to w3m, Gnus takes upwards of thirty
> seconds to render these messages.  Is that supposed to happen?

That sounds excessive, but emacs-w3m does a lot of post-processing of
the output from w3m, so I guess it's possible.

Gnus in Emacs 24 uses a built-in HTML parser so that it doesn't have to
rely on w3m, so it may possibly be faster.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen