Re: gnome-terminal awfully slow - RESOLVED!

[Vlad Berditchevskiy <vlad hashbang de>]

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.

-- 
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