Description of problem: I did an up2date to get all the Aug 28th Null RPM updates. I teach classes and use the overhead so I have my terminal with font size 16. On a Pentium 4 1.9Ghz CPU, 512MB ram, ATI Radeon 32MB video, it now seems very sluggish compared to a fresh install of Null. It also varies dramtically too. $ time ps aux (the ps command has 76 lines of output) (values from back-to-back multiple runs) real 0m0.677s real 0m0.396s real 0m0.788s real 0m1.199s real 0m1.049s real 0m0.819s real 0m1.041s real 0m1.081s real 0m0.219s real 0m0.522s real 0m1.371s real 0m0.175s Notes: 1. my system is otherwise idle. 2. I can also visually see the speed change mid flight. It seems to get drastically faster at a certain point (that point seems to change). 3. On an xterm using "HUGE" fonts (roughtly the same size as 16 point GNOME-terminal fonts), the real time is ALWAYS between .287 and .300. 4. As far as I can remember, this sluggish/changing behavior wasn't there in stock Null. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-terminal-2.0.1-3 vte-0.8.8-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Launch gnome-terminal 2. time ps aux
The slowdown came in as a side-effect of a bug-fix. I've reworked things so that the bug is still fixed but the speed impact is much less. It should be much improved again in 0.8.14.
Things are looking lots better with vte-0.8.15-1.
Agreed. vte performance is pretty competitive with xterm now. Xterm has less variance in performance, but the average is pretty close. To limit the variables, my new test is: $ time cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf (unmodified stock file) With xterm the values are all: real 0m0.251s to 0m0.291s With GNOME2 terminal and vte 0.8.18 the values are all: real 0m0.259s to 0m0.421s (with an average in low 0.300s)