GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 163840
Slow terminal performance with transparency enabled
Last modified: 2006-07-06 00:08:58 UTC
Please describe the problem: Display performance is very slow with transparency enabled in gnome-terminal. 13+ seconds to ls /dev. Without transparency the same command takes 1 sec. Even single keypresses have a slight delay to them. System is Suse 9.2, running on a 2.6g Intel PC w/ 1gb ram. Steps to reproduce: At first boot, if transparency is turned on, ls /dev takes about 15 seconds. If transparency is then turned off, it's down to 1 second. CPU is spiking as the terminal is used. The following workaround may provide insight as to what's going on: 1. Tranparency on, open a terminal. Verify slow display. 2. Right-click on desktop, Select change desktop wallpaper. 3. Select a different backround image, pause, then reselect the original image. Close dialog. 4. Gnome-terminal is now working fine! Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? It is reliably reproducable on this machine. Other information: Please ask if more info is needed.
I have problems with X lagging or giving irregular responsitivity. (See http://www.ii.uib.no/~ketil/ubuntu-prob.log for details) Enabling transparency in gnome-terminal makes the problem *very* noticeable (ie. dragging it over other windows causes mp3 playback to stutter) -kzm <ketil at ii uib no>
Not able to see this here, but I have a P4 1.8 GHz laptop with 1 GB RAM. Which version of vte/gnome-terminal are you using? Ketil, have you seen this on other machines without the nvidia stuff on them?
Any chance of an update on this issue? Have you tried later releases of g-t/vte?
I have seen some changes on the codebase that should make this situation much, much better. Could you please tell us whether you have tried more recent versions of gnome-terminal?
Older g-t versions indeed have been way slower. However, can not reproduce at all with a recent g-t version, even with slower CPU. 'ls /dev' shows up almost instantly -- no lagging, no scrolling. 'time' reports values significantly lower than 0.1s. Considering this issue to be FIXED since. Please feel free to re-open this bug if the issue still persists and provide any additional information you can. Thanks.