Performance tuning the Fedora Desktop

[Warren Togami]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 
> I recently ran a couple of tests (which is why I noticed the xterm mark), 
> just a relatively noisy rpmbuild of an application. On my IBM T40 the 
> build times on otherwise idle box, and completely reproducable, give or 
> take couple of seconds:
> xterm:		~1m 20s
> gnome-terminal: ~1m 40s
> konsole:	~1m 40s
> 
> Building on a virtual console, redirecting output to /dev/null or a file 
> were basically ~1:20 all. That's an awfully lot of time wasted waiting for 
> software to build which lot of us do all the time :-/
> 
> For cat it's much more dramatic (obviously):
> time cat /usr/share/mime-info/gnome-vfs.keys on
> virtual console:~0.5s
> xterm:		~3.5s
> gnome-terminal:	~6.5s
> konsole:	~10.5s (not only is it slow but also corrupts the 
> 		terminal leaving garbage on screen)
> 
> Tests done on RHL 9'ish box, FWIW.
> 
> 	- Panu -

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
wtogami at redhat.com