Re: Speed improvement of gnome-terminal

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lookkas gmail com>]

Anybody tried to take a look at the xterminal (xfce terminal emulator)
that will be shipped with xfce 4.2? It's gtk2-based (pango, aa and
such) and it's fairly faster (startup time) than gnome-terminal on my
machine, an Athlon XP 1700+, 512 RAM DDR, debian unstable, gnome 2.8.

but when I tried the (very crude, don't blame me) benchmark 

cat /var/log/messages, 2.3 Mb

with xterminal (0.1.9), gnome-terminal (2.7.3) and aterm, I got the
following results

xterminal: ~ 11 s, takes 100% CPU time
gnome-terminal: ~ 12 s, takes 100% CPU time 
aterm: ~ 2 s, takes ~ 80% CPU time

Since I don't have KDE installed, I didn't try konsole. Of course,
this results should be taken as a grain of salt, but it seems that
gtk2 + pango have some serious performance problems that need to be
worked. For God Sake, this is not a flame. I'm just suggesting that
the gnome-terminal developers/mantainers (havoc and mariano) can talk
with the xterminal mantainers (Benedikt Meurer, benny xfce org) to
exchange ideas and see what it can be done besides optimizing gtk2 and
pango (again, this is not intended to be a flame).

Best regards 

Lucas

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:50:45 +0800, James Henstridge <james jamesh id au> wrote:
> On 16/10/04 01:12, Nat Friedman wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 01:00 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>gnome-terminal is also noticably faster with antialiasing off - as you'd
> >>expect. That one seems to have a lot to do with poor render acceleration
> >>in Xorg/XFree
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Is there a way to turn antialiasing off only for gnome-terminal?
> >
> >
> It looks like the newer versions of vte include a
> vte_terminal_set_font_full() function that includes a third argument to
> set whether antialiasing should be used.  That argument has three
> values: use the default setting, force enable and force disable.
> 
> It appears that gnome-terminal is using vte_terminal_set_font(), which
> is a wrapper for vte_terminal_set_font_full() that passes
> VTE_ANTI_ALIAS_USE_DEFAULT as the third argument.
> 
> So it would be possible to get gnome-terminal to allow disabling of
> antialiasing.  It is probably worth making it check a gconf key to see
> if it should be disabled for the current profile, even if it is decided
> that it would clutter the preferences dialog.
> 
> Of course, the ideal solution would be if gnome-terminal could figure
> out whether antialiasing is slowing things down too much and turn off AA
> in that case, but that sounds quite difficult to get right.
> 
> James.
> 
> --
> Email: james jamesh id au
> WWW:   http://www.jamesh.id.au/
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 


-- 
==============================
Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues
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e-mail  : lookkas AT gmail DOT com
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