Re: BUG: gnome terminal horrible performance

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Thu, 2004-29-07 at 12:07 -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148796
> 
> Why does gnome-terminal takes so many resources to perform trivial tasks
> such as scrolling text up?

Do you have any numbers on how gnome-terminal is a resource hog? The
numbers return by top/System-monitor/etc are *not* reliable. In general
tracking resource usage requires extensive profiling, and is really non-
trivial. Slowness does not imply resource-hog.

> 
> Experiment: Run gnome-terminal and xterm side by side.

Not a fair comparison since they are not comparable feature wise. Would
you compare a F1 racer and SUV for racetrack speed?

> 
> Do a "cat filename" on a very large file in each one of them and see
> which one is faster.
> xterm can be faster by orders of magnitude (i'm not making things up).

I totally believe you! I'm not sure but this may be due to nothing more
than differences in printing speed. gnome-terminal has to support
multiple languages. I use mine in Japanese as well as latin. A more
interesting test would be to do the same test in Chinese.

> 
> Compile an application that makes gcc very verbose in each terminal.
> With gnome-terminal, the overall system load is significantly higher.

Once again this may be nothing more than xterm can write ASCII text,
where gnome-terminal has to print via Pango.

> 
> Run a "tail -f" on a log file, while at the same time running a time-
> and load-sensitive application such as any digital sound recorder
> (Ardour with JACK) or sequencer (Rosegarden, Muse).
> If "tail -f" runs in gnome-terminal, and the time-critical app does not
> run with real-time privileges, parts of the sound stream will get
> dropped. The drops occur at a much lower frequency (if at all) when
> running "tail -f" in xterm.
> 
> I mean, gnome-terminal is nice and all, but why is it such a huge
> resource hog?
> 
> I am not the first one to raise a flag on this issue. gnome-terminal
> essentially makes it difficult to do time-critical work on a Gnome
> workstation.
> I actually avoid using it.
> 
> Any plans to fix this bug?
> 

This is not really fair at all. Does microsoft have any plans to fix the
"windows security sucks" bug? What you have isn't a bug, its a very
general complaint that every gnome-terminal user is aware of.

The people who are writing our desktops for us for free are very short
of time, and implementing new features is a higher priority than
extensively profiling gnome-terminal for a performance problem than may
be *unavoidable* due to the multi-language requirement.

If you want gnome-terminal to improve you need to provide more help
than, "look at how slow this is!" I'm sorry there aren't infinite
resource available to make everyone happy, but its just a fact of life.

Cheers,
Ryan