If you re using Vim 7.2.269 or later, then there s the --startuptime option you can use.

vim --startuptime vim.log

from the help (vim -h):

--startuptime <file> Write startup timing messages to <file>

I created this Github project in order to better answer your question. Basically, it calls vim s built-in profiler with appropriate flags and options, then sums up the timing for each function calls for every plugins, which is not obvious (but important) from the raw vim --profile output. Bash, Python, R, Ruby and Perl are supported (you don t need to install anything since you most likely have one of those already) for creating the profiling results.

You will get a result figure like this:

Along with text output like this:

Generating vim startup profile...    
Parsing vim startup profile...     
Crunching data and generating profile plot ...    

Your plugins startup profile graph is saved     
as `profile.png` under current directory.    

==========================================    
Top 10 Plugins That Slows Down Vim Startup    
==========================================    
   1    105.13  "vim-colorschemes"    
   2    42.661  "vim-easytags"    
   3    31.173  "vim-vendetta"    
   4    22.02   "syntastic"    
   5    13.362  "vim-online-thesaurus"    
   6    7.888   "vim-easymotion"    
   7    6.931   "vim-airline"    
   8    6.608   "YankRing.vim"    
   9    5.266   "nerdcommenter"    
  10    5.017   "delimitMate"    
==========================================    
Done!    

You can use vim own profiling mechanism:

vim --cmd  profile start profile.log  
    --cmd  profile func *  
    --cmd  profile file *  
    -c  profdel func *  
    -c  profdel file *  
    -c  qa! 

After running the above you will find a file called profile.log in the current directory with all required information. To get per-script information table similar to already present per-function one, use (after opening this file in vim):

" Open profile.log file in vim first
let timings=[]                      
g/^SCRIPT/call add(timings, [getline( . )[len( SCRIPT   ):], matchstr(getline(line( . )+1),  ^Sourced zsd+ )]+map(getline(line( . )+2, line( . )+3),  matchstr(v:val,   d+.d+$  ) ))
enew                            
call setline( . , [ count total (s)   self (s)  script ]+map(copy(timings),  printf("%5u %9s   %8s  %s", v:val[1], v:val[2], v:val[3], v:val[0]) ))

It will be unsorted, but you can always use built-in :sort command if number of scripts is too large.

Based on the work done by @hyiltiz that depends on R, I made a Python version of the profiler, since this is more often available on a system that R.

It s also slightly easier to extend, thus the features are:

• Automatic detection of the plugin folder,
• Bar plot thanks to matplotlib,
• Run the analysis over several executions to get the average/standard deviation,
• Supports both vim and neovim,
• Can be used with a full vim command to test lazy-loading features, opening a file with a specific filetype etc.,
• Export result to a csv file.

The output is similar to what vim-plugins-profile provides:

$ vim-profiler.py -p nvim

Running nvim to generate startup logs... done.
Loading and processing logs... done.
Plugin directory: /home/user/.config/nvim/plugged
=====================================
Top 10 plugins slowing nvim s startup
=====================================
1         3.326   vim-fugitive
2         2.936   tcomment_vim
3         2.315   vim-hybrid
4         1.751   lightline.vim
5         0.959   vim-sneak
6         0.943   supertab
7         0.542   vim-surround
8         0.536   fzf.vim
9         0.450   fzf
10        0.434   auto-pairs
=====================================

You could run vim -V, pipe the output through a utility that adds timestamps and analyze the output. This command lines does this, e.g.:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -MTime::HiRes=time -ne  print time, ": ", $_  | tee vilog

You might have to blindly type :q to get back to your prompt. Afterwards, you should find the file vilog in your current directory with hires timestamps at the beginning of each line.

If you can do with a granularity of a second, you can do this:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -ne  print time, ": ", $_  | tee vilog

I refined the vim -V solution by innaM to show the delta time:

vim -V 2>&1 | perl -MTime::HiRes=time -ne  $a = time unless defined $a; print time - $a, ": ", $_  | tee vilog

If you re loading your plugins from a .vimrc file, what you could do is put a q on some line part way through the file to make it quit so you can use a process timer, like the unix time command. More thoroughly, this would look like:

1. backup existing .vimrc file
2. comment out all but a select number of plugins
3. insert a q line
4. call time vim repeteadly and average
5. restore backup

This is not elegant but I think it will get the job done.

It can be convenient to trace the --startime when opening a particular file

gvim app/views/layouts/application.html.erb --startuptime time.log

There is a plugin to profile the vim start-up time.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2915

Isn t there a bash time command that can be used like so:

time vim

EDIT: Doesn t include the scripts start up time. Use @jamessan suggestion instead.

Another command line util to profile vim startup time written in go.

From the GitHub page:

$ vim-startuptime

By default, it tries to run vim and :quit immediately 10 times, collects the results and outputs a summary of them to stdout.

https://github.com/rhysd/vim-startuptime