FC2: gnome-terminal takes much longer to startup than Mozilla

[Troy Dawson]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, Colin Walters wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 07:30, Yusuf Goolamabbas wrote:
>>
>>>Hi, I installed Fedora Core 2 on an Athlon 750 with 512MB ram with an
>>>Nvidia Vanta II pci video card.
>>>
>>>After a fresh boot, I timed the following
>>>a) startup of Mozilla from the panel till Release notes was rendered
>>>b) startup of gnome-terminal from Fedora Menu->System Tools->Terminal
>>>   till bash prompt
>>>
>>>The timings for a) and b) on 'cold-start' were 10 and 13 seconds
>>>respectively. On a 'warm cache' (ie) start Mozilla/shutdown/start again
>>>the timings were 3 and 11 seconds respectively.
>>>
>>>My expecation is that gnome-terminal is simpler/smaller than Mozilla and
>>>as such should startup much faster
>>
>>My suspicion is that you have something crazy in your shell init files
>>(e.g. ~/.bashrc).
> 
> 
> ...or there's something wrong with DNS - all Gnome (and KDE for that 
> matter) applications take AGES to start if DNS is failing.
> 
> 	- Panu -
> 
> 
This was discussed earlier in the thread "Performance tuning the Fedora 
Desktop".  I think Warren had the real explanation, though I'm certain there 
could be others.
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In FC2 things have changed for the worse for gnome-terminal performance, where 
it has become far worse than both konsole and xterm.  A GNOME developer 
explained to me that was the trade-off necessary in making gnome-terminal able 
to display unicode characters with pango.  I do admit it is nice to have that 
ability, and it is awesome to see CJK characters working in gnome-terminal, 
but at the same time I wish it were faster.

Very often I am forced to minimize my gnome-terminal sessions in order to 
prevent 100% CPU usage while using remote ssh sessions or building something 
locally.  The bottleneck is always my terminal CPU usage. =(

Warren Togami
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