Re: gnome-terminal awfully slow. :-(

[Shahms King <shahms shahms com>]

On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 15:00, Vlad Berditchevskiy wrote:
> Jason Tackaberry <tack auc ca> writes:
> 
> >> slower on text output than in Gnome 2.0.x. :-( The slowness is even
> >> noticable by just moving the terminal window around the desktop. Not
> >> only the terminal text is slow, but also the menu. Other gnome 2.2
> > 
> > My hunch is you're using transparent gnome-terminal.
> 
> No, I don't. Just a solid black background. I found an explanation of my
> problem in another thread (IIRC it was some redhat mailing list). The
> slowness is due to the fact that the new gnome-terminal is linked
> against libvte instead of libzvt by default, and vte seems to be much
> slower.
> 
> The difference is tremendous. For example, if I execute "ls -lR
> /usr/share" I get the following results:
> 
> gnome-terminal-2.2.1: about 1 minute 30 seconds
> multi-gnome-terminal: about 3.5 seconds
> xterm: about 3 seconds

Yes, VTE is slower than ZVT, but I seriously doubt it is solely
responsible for this. Additionally, I think you'd be hard pressed to
find a gnome-terminal compiled with zvt at this point.  Which terminal
did you run ls -lR in first? Remember that the kernel caches reads and
that makes a *serious* difference. Running:

time ls -lR /usr/share > /dev/null (testing only ls -lR, irrespective of
terminal speed) Gives a rather significant difference between the first
run and any subsequent runs. (On my machine it's a difference of 15 or
more seconds to ~1 second)

Output from xterm and gnome-terminal (2.0.2 vte) and gnome-terminal
(2.1.4 vte) (2nd run on each terminal, after piping output to /dev/null
to try and get similarly cached data for each terminal):
Note: I do not have the NVidia drivers, but am running CVS XFree86

xterm:
real    1m5.519s
user    0m1.795s
sys     0m0.736s

g-t-2.0:
real    1m7.472s
user    0m1.842s
sys     0m0.797s

g-t-2.1.4:
real    1m6.678s
user    0m1.813s
sys     0m0.813s

As you can see, somewhat surprisingly (I thought VTE was slow), these
numbers are all quite similar.  Additionally, given that the cached
speed of an ls -lR /usr/share piped to /dev/null is about 2 seconds, 3
seconds is nearly unbelievable unless 1) you minimized the window or
switched to another workspace (or possible just obscured it in someway)
or 2) ls didn't output everything it should have.

-- 
Shahms King <shahms shahms com>