Vim and slow connections

Today I was setting up a VPN connection between my work laptop and the office to enable me to work from home and ran into a bit of a problem, whenever I tried opening a file at the office in Vim it would be unbearably slow, so slow in fact that getting any work done at all became practically impossible.

After some careful googling and I finally found a solution to my problem and I thought I'd share it here, it really boils down to a couple of simple lines in your .vimrc file.

set dir=C:\\tmp
let loaded_matchparen = 1

The first line makes Vim create swap files locally instead of on the remote server. The second line disables parenthesis matching which for some reason generates a lot of disk I/O, without it Vim becomes quite snappy.