2/11/2006
Comparing Terminal Speed
Cardoe wrote this in the wee hours:
I decided to check gnome-terminal and it’s speed, but it doesn’t look like I’m the first to notice this. I decided to do some testing. Below includes results from xterm, aterm, Eterm and gnome-terminal. Sorry KDE people, I don’t have qt or kdelibs installed, don’t wanna spend several hours compiling them just to test. I ran each term 5 times and ran a copy of the terminal on another desktop so loading the app from the harddrive is a non-factor. The command I ran was “time ${TERMINAL} -e ‘find /etc’”, depending on the terminal it needed or didn’t need ‘ marks.
Oh, gnome-terminal also made CPU usage of X spike way higher. But that could be because there wasn’t enough time to grab enough samples and really make the value spike up.
Filed under: 10 Responses to “Comparing Terminal Speed”
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February 11th, 2006 at 2:37 am
It would have been interesting to see urxvt (unicode-rxvt) in on this.
February 11th, 2006 at 3:08 am
I seem to remember a good presentation about optimizing gnome apps, wonder where the drive went to optimize the gnome code base?
February 11th, 2006 at 3:34 am
Actually, VTE, the library that gnome-terminal uses for the outputting, just yesterday or so got some nice patches applied by Behdad Esfahbod. The guy who has been handling VTE releasing lately said that these will be part of the monday’s new GNOME tarballs (beta 2).
I’d suggest to get that and re-measure.
Important thing to also note is, that many of the competitors use aliased font drawing, so to compare fairly, one should make gnome-terminal hit the non anti-aliased paths aswell, which it can do. Comparing anti-aliased to aliased output is apples and oranges.
http://mces.blogspot.com/2006/02/vte-is-fast-now.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/2006-February/msg00006.html
February 11th, 2006 at 4:29 am
here’s konsole’s times:
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.295s
user 0m0.707s
sys 0m0.161s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.252s
user 0m0.749s
sys 0m0.113s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.249s
user 0m0.738s
sys 0m0.129s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.215s
user 0m0.714s
sys 0m0.145s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.233s
user 0m0.731s
sys 0m0.131s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.788s
user 0m0.733s
sys 0m0.137s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.821s
user 0m0.735s
sys 0m0.130s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.782s
user 0m0.738s
sys 0m0.133s
konsole from xterm:
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.788s
user 0m0.733s
sys 0m0.137s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.821s
user 0m0.735s
sys 0m0.130s
ash@ash ~ $ time konsole -e find /etc
real 0m1.782s
user 0m0.738s
sys 0m0.133s
February 11th, 2006 at 4:42 am
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/2006-February/msg00006.html
February 11th, 2006 at 4:58 am
I don’t make the same observations.
I ran “time find /etc” within the launched terminals:
xterm 207: real 0m2.054s, user 0m0.012s, sys 0m0.108s
gnome-terminal 2.12.0: real 0m1.001s, user 0m0.016s, sys 0m0.120s
Eterm 0.9.3-r4: real 0m0.191s, user 0m0.020s, sys 0m0.080s
For me gnome-terminal is faster than xterm…, only Eterm is the fastest. Don’t have aterm, didn’t test it.
Could it be a matter of the performance of the graphic driver? I have xorg 6.8.2-r6 and nvidia-{kernel,glx} 1.0.6629-r5.
CPU consumption of gnome-terminal is very low, it is not higher than xterm’s.
February 11th, 2006 at 5:21 am
multi-gnome-terminal would’ve been interesting to see. I think I remember reading the reason the author released it was because of how horribly bad gnome terminal is.
February 11th, 2006 at 6:43 am
I know, gnoem-terminal is slow, but I think your test misses one bit.
The user-time for gnome-terminal is lets say, not bad, but not good either, but not even near those 8 seconds you posted.
As you can read here: http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/35270.htm, gnome-terminal pulls in all fonts available, and parses them (including ~/.fonts). This is not the fault of gnome-terminal, but the one of fontconfig, that does that. There is a patch in fontconfig-cvs that fixes this issue, so you should try with that patch and remeasure
February 11th, 2006 at 10:25 am
have you got xorg 7.0 + EXA and a false-transparent background in gnome-terminal?
I noticed that performances dropped in this case (time x 3) and I had to use a fixed color background to have the same speed.
February 11th, 2006 at 10:45 am
It would be very interesting to know what fonts you have used in each case.
A few month ago (oct. 2005), i did some similar test on Xterm/Gnome-Terminal/Urxvt (with whatever versions were latest at this time), and the results were the following:
- Xterm/bitmap fonts was 4 times faster than Gnome-Terminal/TTF fonts (didn’t try Xterm with TTF font iirc)
- Gnome-Terminal/bitmaps was twice faster than Xterm/bitmaps (and thus 8 times faster than with Gnome-Terminal/TTF). That was a surprise for me, hence my question about the fonts you have used.
- Urxvt/TTF was twice faster than Gnome-Terminal/bitmaps (and 16 times faster than Gnome-Terminal/TTF, for the exact same smooth rendering… not bad!)
Btw, I did this tests because i was curious after reading this entries on McEs’ blog:
http://mces.blogspot.com/2005/10/gnome-terminal-performance.html
http://mces.blogspot.com/2005/10/behdads-pango-roadmap.html