Re: Speed improvement of gnome-terminal

[Dave Ahlswede <mightyquinn charter net>]

On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 15:21 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Pango is used very little in vte. I think at this point the major
> slowdown in gnome-terminal is rendering the text. If you pick a bitmap
> font its a lot faster. If someone wants to optimize this they need to
> work on the Xserver level to make Xrender faster. Latest Xorg version
> already has some optimizations in this area.

I don't think that's entirely it.. rxvt-unicode has similar capabilities
to Gnome-terminal (Xft fonts, unicode support, automatic
font-switching), and for some reason or another renders text much
faster. 

This can be observed by catting a large text file (One that would take
several seconds to completely print), and observing a CPU monitor--
Gnome-terminal causes the CPU usage to go up appreciably higher than
rxvt-unicode's. (On my system, gnome-terminal measures about 40% usage,
while rxvt measures in at about 13%). This is with the same Xft font,
fully antialiased.

So I think there's definitely a possibility for some sort of speedup in
the rendering somewhere.