Large slowdown for acronym decorations

[empwilli]

With org-ref version 3.0 (according to the version statement in org-ref.el) I experience slowdowns on typing to the point of unusability, when I have more than just a few acronyms in a paragraph. The builtin profiler directly points me to org-ref-acronym-face-fn:

       32136  89% - redisplay_internal (C function)
       31984  88%  - jit-lock-function
       31984  88%   - jit-lock-fontify-now
       31984  88%    - jit-lock--run-functions
       31984  88%     - run-hook-wrapped
       31984  88%      - #<compiled 0x19b66f4dbbc4777d>
       31984  88%       - font-lock-fontify-region
       31984  88%        - font-lock-default-fontify-region
       31984  88%         - font-lock-fontify-keywords-region
       31976  88%          - org-activate-links
       31908  88%           + org-ref-acronym-face-fn
          36   0%           + org-ref-cite-activate
           4   0%             org-element-link-parser
           4   0%           + org-remove-flyspell-overlays-in

I had a brief look into this function and believe the culprit is org-parse-acronym-entry which is repeatedly called in order to determine, whether the acronym is a valid entry, or not. Indeed, statically assigning the org-ref-acronym-face for all acronym links, indifferent whether they are valid or not, resolves this issue for me. For me this workaround is doable.

(cl-dolist (mapping org-ref-acronym-types)
  (org-link-set-parameters (cl-first mapping)
			   :face 'org-ref-acronym-face))

One possible long term solution that I can imagine would probably to cache all acronym entries instead of frequently reparsing the file.

Nevertheless, I'm a huge fan of your work, thanks a lot :)

[jkitchin]

This is a regression. You are right that the two options are not validating or using a cache. I think I used to do that, but in the rewrite took it out because it was complicated, especially to figure out when to invalidate it. I will probably have a need to fix this in the next month or so, and hopefully that will improve it for you.

[jkitchin]

@empwilli I think the commits above should go a long way to improving performance here. Let me know how they work for you.