GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131461
gnome-terminal is slow!
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I have run ls -lR on my home directory with xterm, konsole and gnome-terminal (maximized window and without dircolors), here are my results: konsole first run: 0m7.442s second run: 0m8.538s third run: 0m7.738s -------------------- average : 0m7.905s xterm first run: 0m6.547s second run: 0m5.423s thrid run: 0m5.385s -------------------- average : 0m5.784s gnome-terminal first run: 0m35.169s second run: 0m37.131s third run: 0m37.086s --------------------- average : 0m36.461 The conclusion xterm ........... 100 % konsole ......... 136 % gnome-terminal .. 630 % The results speak for themselfs! The test was run on a Slackware 9.1 with Dropline GNOME 2.4.1.
*** Bug 132285 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Changing the summary so that we can use this as a general “g-t is slow” bug
hi. i'll add my "benchmarks" also: gentoo-linux, gnome-hmm...newest devel packages (around 2.5.3?), gnome-terminal-2.5.1 vte-0.11.10 laptop, centrino-1.4ghz, 512MB ram, ati-9000m graphics card. there are 2 possible drivers: a binary one from ati, and the "radeon" driver from xfree. i use 1400x1050, the font is fixed-misc. as a benchmark i used the "time cat mplayer.c" command (mplayer.c has around 3700 lines), and repeated it 3-5 times, tohave the file cached in memory. then i calculated the average. when i use the ati-binary drivers: konsole: 0.32 seconds gnome-term: 1.7seconds when i use the xfree ati drivers: konsole: 0.2 seconds gnome-term: 0.4 seconds (enabling/disabling transparency doesn't change anything) so, there are 2 "problems": 1. the ati-binary drivers are slower, 2. gnome-term is ALWAYS slower than konsole
so it would be good to know on what hardware+drivers did drac@gmx.net (Cristian Adam) make his tests (nvidia binary drivers? ati drivers? what graphics card?). (btw. on my desktop computer (nvidia-binary drivers), i also get terrible gnome-term performance, while konsole performance seems to be ok)
I've rerun the tests (this time without konsole, because I've removed KDE from my system). My configuration: Intel Celeron 1000MHz, Gnome Terminal 2.4.2, NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 400 with NVIDIA 5336 binary drivers and 1152x864 resolution. 1. Gnome Terminal (with dircolors) time ls -lR on my home 1m02.105s 0m59.148s 1m00.783s 2. XTerm (with dircolors) and the following configuration (~/.XResources) xterm*background : black xterm*foreground: white xterm*faceName : Andale Mono xterm*faceSize : 10 to have the same true type font that Gnome Terminal uses 0m11.251s 0m11.545s 0m10.195s Xterm looks the same as gnome terminal and is 6 times faster. (BTW on a real 80x25 console, ls -lR is executed in 2 seconds. but it's not 142x45 like the xterm and gnome-terminal)
I experimented a bit with this now and I can see that making changes to .XResources does nothing on my fedora core 1 system. I changed gnome-terminal to use the same font as xterm - "fixed 10 pt" and now I see xterm taking between 0.7 - 1.4 secons to do ls -l /usr/lib. gnome-terminal does the same at a consistent 1.6 seconds. This makes it seem to me that the difference isn't that huge. I've got a 1.2 MHz PIII laptop using the XFree radeon driver.
There was a typo there the file is not .XResources but .Xresources
Actually, that's what I used out of habit, but after not seeing any change I tried .XResources too, with no luck of course. :-?
Now I've completed the tests: 1. xfree86 drivers (nv) gnome-terminal xterm 0m48.787s 0m44.556s 2. nvidia drivers (nvidia with "RenderAccel" "off") gnome-terminal xterm 1m6.616s 0m43.969s 3. nvidia drivers (nvidia with "RenderAccel" "on") gnome-terminal xterm 0m56.487s 0m9.997s Option "RenderAccel" "boolean" Enable or disable hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension. THIS OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL. ENABLE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is no correctness test suite for the RENDER extension so NVIDIA can not verify that RENDER acceleration works correctly. The conclusion is: gnome-terminal doesn't use the hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension, while xterm and konsole do.
Added dependency on #137864 - take a look for some more detailed profiling.
More benchmarks... the test machine was a 1.3ghz centrino laptop with a radeon mobility 7500, with the stock xorg drivers. The test was a simple time perl -e 'foreach $i (1 .. 10000) { print "This is line $i This is line $i T his is line $i\n"; }' repeated a few times, picking an average-looking run from each set. I don't trust the cpu % numbers in the time output though; top reported far different percentages. The X load was gleaned from just watching top on a separate computer via ssh. Not a very scientific test, but interesting... a gnome-rxvt-unicode looks interesting :) Terminal emulators tried were g-t, xterm, original rxvt, and rxvt-unicode (adds unicode and Xft support). linux: (xorg ati drivers, g-t 2.6.0) g-t (vera sans mono): perl -e 0.06s user 0.03s system 1% cpu 7.893 total; 65% X load rxvt-unicode (vera sans mono, xft): perl -e 0.06s user 0.04s system 1% cpu 9.2 08 total; 90% X load g-t (fixed): perl -e 0.09s user 0.09s system 2% cpu 6.517 total; 25% X load xterm (fixed): perl -e 0.10s user 0.11s system 4% cpu 4.675 total; 30% X load rxvt (fixed): perl -e 0.10s user 0.08s system 29% cpu 0.600 total; negligible X load rxvt-unicode (fixed): perl -e 0.07s user 0.07s system 24% cpu 0.583 total; neg ligible X load
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 137864 ***