[ethereal]

I've found that my impression of CtrlP's speed varies dramatically depending on the project that I'm working on. For projects such as Bochs [0] (~750 files in CtrlP), I get annoyed at the initial .5-sec wait [1], but after that it's extremely fast. I don't have a particularly fast processor, either.

I find CtrlP breaks down with large projects such as the Linux kernel. While it's fast to find the initial list of files (2 seconds or so) it's extremely slow to actually search through said list, about .5-sec per keystroke.

[0] I'm not a maintainer, I just happen to be using its wonderful instrumentation hooks in a research project.

[1] It's about half a second on my laptop, which has an SSD. This time is dramatically larger if you have a rotary drive, more like 10-20 seconds IIRC.