RE: Q on performance with 10000 faces

[Drew Adams]

    >     > Does this mean that Emacs cannot reasonably be expected to
    >     > display 10000 face text-properties?
    >
    >     AFAIK, yes.  Doing what you did (a) disables all possible display
    >     optimizations that the redisplay engine has up its sleeve
    >     to speed up the common cases, and (b) forces Emacs to traverse
    >     the 10000 text properties for each character it is about to
display.
    >
    > What is it that you think I did that causes that? Perhaps I
    > could do things differently. Do you mean just the fact of using
    > 10000 different face text properties or something else also?

    Are you still interested in the answers, given that Kim suggested a
    different approach?

Yes. I'm interested in using faces, if possible, and I'm interested in using
images, if not.

    If you are interested, please post the shortest Lisp code that can be
    used to reproduce and investigate this situation.

OK. I pared it down a bit to send along, and then I tried it in emacs -q.
Result: I do not see the huge slowdown in emacs -q. So, there must be
somthing else that I'm doing in my own environment. Sorry for the false
alarm. We can be thankful for the good news!

Could someone please either describe how to profile or debug the problem
locally, to see where Emacs is spending its cycles, or point me to some doc
that describes that process? I'm hoping there is an easy way to do this with
Emacs Lisp, and without installing extra development tools. (The alternative
is to try removing libraries I use until I no longer see the problem, but
that risks taking a while.)

Thx.