I recently ran a couple of tests (which is why I noticed the xterm mark), just a relatively noisy rpmbuild of an application. On my IBM T40 the build times on otherwise idle box, and completely reproducable, give or take couple of seconds:
xterm: ~1m 20s
gnome-terminal: ~1m 40s
konsole: ~1m 40s
Building on a virtual console, redirecting output to /dev/null or a file were basically ~1:20 all. That's an awfully lot of time wasted waiting for software to build which lot of us do all the time :-/
For cat it's much more dramatic (obviously):
time cat /usr/share/mime-info/gnome-vfs.keys on
virtual console:~0.5s
xterm: ~3.5s
gnome-terminal: ~6.5s
konsole: ~10.5s (not only is it slow but also corrupts the terminal leaving garbage on screen)
Tests done on RHL 9'ish box, FWIW.
- Panu -
In FC2 things have changed for the worse for gnome-terminal performance, where it has become far worse than both konsole and xterm. A GNOME developer explained to me that was the trade-off necessary in making gnome-terminal able to display unicode characters with pango. I do admit it is nice to have that ability, and it is awesome to see CJK characters working in gnome-terminal, but at the same time I wish it were faster.
Very often I am forced to minimize my gnome-terminal sessions in order to prevent 100% CPU usage while using remote ssh sessions or building something locally. The bottleneck is always my terminal CPU usage. =(
Warren Togami wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx
