On windows my current cygwin session with tmux and a single markdown document open in vim is about 25MB. Some of my chrome tabs (jira is the most complicated thing open) are nearing 200MB, somehow outlook is taking about 500MB and Visual Studio is eating many GB's.

It's extraordinary how wasteful some apps can be.

Not sure, but I have had vim lock up my MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and force me to do a hard reboot

That sounds like an OS/hardware problem, honestly. There's no reason vim with any setup should lock up a machine.

The linter was the issue.

I actually have better performance with Sublime Text and JavaScript than I do with vim and JavaScript. I wish that weren’t the case.

If you know if any better ways to get vim working with Syntastic for linting (eslint), I would love to know.

Agreed, if anything will slog a text editor it is usually the linter

Also, you can choke vim with large (>5gb) test files. Or is that fixed now?

The irony is that sublime text doesn’t slog down

Sublime Text and TextMate will both choke big time if you feed them a large enough file without any line breaks. I have some largish machine-generated (5-10 MB) JavaScript data files that will reliably bring either editor to its knees if I accidentally click on one of them. The XCode editor also chokes.

I seem to recall (though haven't tried it for a while) that the Visual Studio Code editor handles them okay.

It's not a big issue -- since these are machine-generated, it's not normally necessary to edit them by hand. Every once in a while, though, I'll accidentally click on one of them in the file tree. Then I'll curse and kill the editor process.

Switch syntastic for ale: https://github.com/w0rp/ale It's asynchronous if you're running vim8+

Awesome, thanks for this!