Ah. Yes, the short delays you describe seem to match up with when the editor looks up tagged symbols to build tooltips, etc.
I suspect that the longer delays occur when the editor looks up the symbol under the cursor and then shows it in the Preview toolbar. In order to show it in the Preview toolbar, it is going to need to load the corresponding file. If the corresponding file is on a network drive, then any slowness in the network will directly manifest as pauses in the editor
*.
Can you try something: Do the pauses still occur after you close the Preview toolbar (close it; auto-hide isn't enough) and turn off tooltips? To turn off tooltips, open the Options dialog and go to the Context Tagging node for the language you're using, and uncheck the "Show info for symbol under mouse" checkbox.
* The editor could potentially mitigate network problems by using a background thread to load the files, but (a) that can get complicated and lead to its own set of issues, (b) I don't know if SE is multi-threaded enough for that (maybe it is, maybe no, I do not know), and (c) persistent network problems would either result in a buildup of hung background threads (if loads occur in parallel) or all subsequent background local loads bottlenecking against the network load (if loads are serialized on a background worker thread). It may be that the best solution is to turn off the features entirely.
@SlickTeam: If there is a way to detect with relatively high confidence whether a file is "remote", then perhaps a def_no_background_remote_loads setting (bad name
pick a better one) could restrict the editor to only load local files and thus avoid the most common cause for pauses?
