Re: gnome-terminal awfully slow - RESOLVED!

[axel c <axel banzais org>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 19:20, Vlad Berditchevskiy wrote:
> Shahms King <shahms shahms com> writes:
> 
> >> gnome-terminal-2.2.1: about 1 minute 30 seconds
> >> multi-gnome-terminal: about 3.5 seconds
> >> xterm: about 3 seconds
> > 
> > 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)
> 
> Yes, I know about it, so I always did some "empty" runs before I
> measured the time. But that was not the reason! After several people had
> reported that they either did not see any difference or the difference
> was not so significant, I understood that there was something wrong with
> my system. I tried to play with terminal options (with or without
> background, different fonts etc), even to recompile it, but nothing
> helped. To understand how slow it felt: when I pasted text from the
> clipboard, I could see how characters were printed one by one! And
> that's on a dual Athlon 2000+ with 1 gig of RAM! Pasting of just one
> line of text took about 0.2-0.5 seconds! Printing something on the
> terminal always caused 100% CPU usage, and when I switched between
> workspaces, it took about 1 second to redraw gnome-terminal window
> contents.
> 
> And then, I finally found the reason: I was starting the gnome session
> with GDK_USE_XFT=0. I set this variable a long time ago after upgrading
> to Gnome 2.0, because fontconfig/Xft2 did not see my bitmap fonts.
> 
> I set GDK_USE_XFT=1 and restarted the gnome session, and suddenly
> gnome-terminal wasn't that slow any more. The same benchmark as before:
> 
> multi-gnome-terminal (libzvt, Gnome 1.4):
> real	0m2.882s
> user	0m1.090s
> sys	0m0.740s
> 
> gnome-terminal 2.2.1:
> real    0m7.671s
> user    0m1.000s
> sys     0m0.650s
> 
> It's still considerably slower, but it's acceptable, the difference is
> not noticable in everyday usage (nevertheless, I think, there is a bug
> in VTE, because other programs run fast even when wich GDK_USE_XFT=0,
> but it's no so important now).
> 
> Now I have another problem: how can I get my bitmap PCF fonts back? I put
> them on ~/.fonts and run "fc-cache -v":
> 
> ,----
> | fc-cache: "/home/vlad/.fonts": caching, 0 fonts, 0 dirs
> | fc-cache: failed
> `----
> 
> What's wrong? I can see those fonts with non-xft programs.


alright,

enough screwing my eyes with the old xterm with 9 point fonts ---
aaaahhh :P

welcome back you naughty gnome-terminal

thanks! :)
-- 
axel c <axel banzais org>