One of Emacs’ really nice features is TRAMP. It allows you to edit files on a remote system and otherwise interact with that system as if you were working on your local machine. The problem with it is that it can sometimes be slow, even unusably so.
Troy Hinckley over at Core Dumped has a very interesting post on making TRAMP faster. Oddly, almost everything he does is merely adjusting settings. He writes a bit of code to implement caching but even that is minimal.
Hinckley’s post is long and complicated because he explains what he’s doing and why it works. He’s spent a lot of time profiling and researching how TRAMP works. That’s nice because it means that he’s not just trying things to see if they work.
This is a short post because rather than simply listing the things that Hinckley did without explaining the reasons for them, I’m going to send you over to his post to get the full story. If you’ve tried using TRAMP but found it too slow for your particular workflow, take a look at Hinckley’s post. His changes are easy to implement so you can try them out without a lot of effort.
Happily, my use of TRAMP mostly involves the local network or remotes connected with a high speed network so I usually don’t experience these slowdowns. Even so, it’s probably worth implementing his changes.