Powerline is slow on OSX

[dandrzejewski]

I'm using powerline with the default configs. The prompts take a noticeable amount of time to appear on OSX.

I've tried both zsh and bash, and I am running powerline-daemon -q in .bash_profile/.zshrc.

I'm not 100% sure that this is a bug, but I'm willing to provide any information you need.

[ZyX-I]

I can recommend running

python -m cProfile -o /tmp/profile /path/to/powerline-daemon --replace

and posting the /tmp/profile file here after some time (note: use powerline-daemon --kill prior to posting it). Though most likely the problem is with either VCS branch segment or with configuration reloading.

Note: if you have some passwords in configuration (e.g. for email_imap_alert) I am not sure that profiling module will not save it somewhere, so they should be removed prior to profiling.

You can also try to find out what is the culprit by removing some segments from configuration. This is not helpful if culprit is configuration reloading though.

[etienned]

I'm trying to use powerline 2.0 on OS X (10.10.1) with fish shell but it's really slow. I'm running powerline-daemon -q in my config.fish but I can see in top that each new prompt create a new python process. It looks like powerline didn't use is daemon.

[ZyX-I]

@etienned I guess this is #1297.

[ZyX-I]

@etienned It is also possible that you are using Python version of client (which is slowest of the three of them). Check out file "$(which powerline)": this may be Python script, shell script or an executable (ELF on linux, dunno how it is named in OS X).

[etienned]

OK, I found the problem. I was installing powerline with pip but not with --user. When installing this way the powerline scripts were not install at all. After reinstalling the dev version with --user and fixed the $PATH, everything was fine.

I saw in the instructions that I should use --user but didn't know why so I tried without. Is there a way to install it globally?

Thanks for your work and time.

[ZyX-I]

@etienned They should work the either way. pip on OS X has its specific issues, including not working --user if you installed pip one way (there is a note on this in OS X installation instructions). Powerline has no code that is (not) run only if --user is enabled (in fact, I don’t even know how to do this), so if you want to work without --user then bug pip developers.

[etienned]

Understood. It's definitely an installation problem where pip is the culprit. I will take some time a bit later to try to understand why pip didn't install /scripts/powerline* files when running globally. If I find something relevant I will let you know and pip developers.

[etienned]

Just for the info. After investigation, I found that, when installing powerline globally with pip (with sudo and without --user) using stock python on OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), the powerline client is installed in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/ instead of /usr/local/bin. I definitely don't know why but I'm not a packaging specialist. I'm using homebrew but not to install python at the moment.

[dandrzejewski]

Sorry for the delay. Here's a profile in this gist.

https://gist.github.com/dandrzejewski/821df90652f4c9b7ea7d