Fix performance of VIM syntax highlighting in XML files

Normally Vim is damn fast and this is one reason why I love it. But today I got an XML file with over 3 million lines and after opening that file I wanted to jump to the end of the file. This took me over 1 minute which is unacceptable. Turning of syntax highlighting fixes this performance issue, but of course I don’t want to disable it.

I found the solution on stack overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19030290/syntax-highlighting-causes-terrible-lag-in-vim

The problem was caused by one regex entry of syntax/xml.vim.
The line containing the regex for xmlSyncDT was causing this issue.

" synchronizing
" TODO !!! to be improved !!!

syn sync match xmlSyncDT grouphere  xmlDocType +\_.\(<!DOCTYPE\)\@=+

By commenting this out the performance issue is gone without noticeable sideeffects. The comment above the line shows already that the developer of this file is not happy with it. I can live perfectly without this.
Now I can jump to the end of the 3 million line file without any noticeable delays.

The post on Stackoverflow shows also how to debug such issues:

:syntime on
// do something
:syntime report

This statistic shows you where in the syntax highlighter the CPU time gets “burned”.