Comments on: Comprehensive Linux Terminal Performance Comparison

By: Ben in Seattle

Ben in Seattle — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:39:31 +0000

It’s possible Emacs is actually faster than my measurements show. I just ran the test on gnome-terminal and came up with 1.2 seconds, which is dramatically higher than the results everybody else is getting. Probably the machine I’m on has some X deficiency.

For people who like Emacs’ line-number-mode, but don’t want the overhead in a shell, here’s a kludge that disables counting lines only in command line interface buffers:

;; Turn off line-number-mode in shells to speed it up.
(add-hook
‘comint-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(set (make-local-variable ‘line-number-display-limit) 0)))

By: Ben in Seattle

Ben in Seattle — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:15:17 +0000

Those results surprised me, since I always assumed xterm’s JumpScroll feature would allow it to go, effectively, infinitely fast.

One terminal emulator you forgot to measure is Emacs’s shell. It has an infinite scrollback buffer, so is slowed slightly by malloc. Here are the results for Emacs 23.2:

Emacs 23.2 (buffer visible): 3.5 seconds
Emacs 23.2 (buffer hidden): 1.5 seconds

Enabling line-number-mode in the shell dramatically slows the terminal (to about 10 seconds).

By: MikeW

MikeW — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:01:28 +0000

Another variable is, how much of the terminal is visible.

I found a few years ago that kernel builds on RedHat 9 ran much faster if I a) covered the term window with another window or b) minimised it.

So possibly if you want the fastest output with the ability to check what’s going on, just leave the line at the term bottom showing beneath another window on top.

Or maybe display drivers are better these days !

By: krxlprnft

krxlprnft — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:35:36 +0000

I cannot share the assessment in the post that the gnome-terminal/xfce-terminal or konsole are faster than xterm. I use only these, so I don’t know about others. XTerm on my 1.4GHz Laptop is by far the most efficient terminal of the lot.
Terminal usage and editing in vim on 1680×1050 or using screen everything except xterm starts to suck. There might be some trickery with the graphics card going on, making the others faster on a current systems.

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By: Business Moves from Microsoft to Linux, Saves Money, Gets Better Performance

Business Moves from Microsoft to Linux, Saves Money, Gets Better Performance — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:56:44 +0000

[...] Comprehensive Linux Terminal Performance Comparison Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting factor. http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/09/01/comprehensive-linux-terminal-performance-comparison/ [...]

By: paul fox

paul fox — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:50:08 +0000

@Anonymous
the fastest terminal emulator is my own — fcterm. I looked at gnome – it is fast for small windows and horrendous for large windows (rowsxcols). fcterm uses the same tricks as the other emulators, but combines them and gets a one up, along with infinite scrollback.

its not open source (because I havent bothered to package it that way), but if anyone is interested they can contact me at fox-at-crisp-demon-co-uk.

(it is free tho).

By: Boris Toloknov

Boris Toloknov — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:08:26 +0000

I did some comparations for rxvt, xterm ( Linux ) and windows console ( 2000 Pro, cmd.exe ) with similar enviroment: almost the same accelerated nvidia drivers; window size: 91×35; fonts: xos4-terminus-bold 20px ( linux ) and “Raster Font” 10x20px ( windows console ).
Windows console has screen buffer size == window size. rxvt and xterm have default buffer size.
The Results:
rxvt: 0.8 sec
xterm: 2.8 sec
windows console ( cmd.exe ): 23.6 sec

By: Boris Toloknov

Boris Toloknov — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:50:57 +0000

Hi,
IMHO the results for Windows look suspicious. I never have anything even close to that on any Windows machine. I used fixed raster font for cmd and interrupted “cat rfc3261.txt” in a minute. The same results for “type rfc3261.txt”. The Cygwin’s rxvt does “cat rfc3261.txt” in about 1 sec even with larger font. How did you manage to get the same time for xterm and cmd ?

By: Martin Ankerl

Martin Ankerl — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:41:04 +0000

hi Michael, I am sorry if your previous post was somehow swallowed. I only delete spam messages with links to dubious sites, never other opinions.

In my experience gnome-terminal *is* faster than xterm, because it is smarter. no terminal has any idea which program is used, so instead of cat you can also use any other program that quickly pumps out characters to the screen.