I’ve used the “trick” described by Emmanuele Bassi on the gmpc playlist-model. I’ve bumped up the maximum playlist size in mpd to 65536 and gave it a try.

The time (roughly) when connecting to mpd, is 2 seconds for fetching the information from mpd. (complete id3 info for the 65536 songs, 14.3 mbyte of data). The filling of the playlist (this is the time the progress bar works, (so this is updated too in that time) is also around 2 seconds. At this point the list is viewable, you can scroll through it and select songs to play. The treeview is still doing some calculations in the back (row heights etc I assume) for a few seconds, for the single column this is shorter then multiple columns.

This is a huge improvement, and gmpc was already fast compared to other mpd clients. and there still is room for improvements. like for example enabling fixed-height in the tree..

These numbers aren’t that shocking compared to f.e. philip work, but I am happy with it.