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).

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.

I’m annoyed, I’m not going to write it again. Basically, your results are incorrect as you’re timing how long it takes “cat” to terminate, NOT how long it takes to display anything on screen.

I can trivially write a terminal that reads everything from cat as quickly as possible, which would pass your test above with flying colours, yet still not render a single character to screen.

This is probably what gnome-terminal does to get its speed increase over the other terminal emulators. As you can see from the anecdotal evidence above, it doesn’t display to the screen as often as a real terminal emulator, and certainly wouldn’t display the same speed increases if faced with a large number of very small writes or changes, such as is caused by your common or garden console application.

Please *please* flag these misleading statements about xterm and gnome terminal as such. These results are not useful for anyone picking a terminal, and just lead to the pollution of the small amount of useful information on the Internet about this subject, which is how I ended up at this page in the first place. A member of an IRC channel quoted these results as the reason that “gnome-terminal is faster than xterm”. Having anecdotal evidence to the contrary (and timings of real-world applications, such as a large compilation, taking about 5s faster on xterm than gnome-terminal over a 2 minute compilation) I decided to look into this and find out why it was incorrect.

I STRONGLY urge any reader of this page to actually test each of the popular terminals themselves, with the applications and use cases that they are going to use them for.

i like it because its compact and simple, i’ve never had the time to fiddle another flashier terminal to be as “clean”.

i’ve been aware of xterms performance limitations for a long time now, the reason for them in my case is this :

xterm -T rwdlsd -sb -sl 100000 -ls -bg grey80 -fg black

100,000 lines of buffer.

it eats a LOT of memory per instance when maximised. 208MB per instance, or 91MB per 80×25 instance.

it took 1:20 for your test on my 1800 turion 64 at max speed with that desktop displayed.
maximised it took 1:23

i opened gnome-terminal and set the buffer to 100,000 lines and it took :

real 0m1.973s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.028s

to do the same job. hopefully i can tune it to be plain and boring too.

if you have any hints on duplicating the behaviour i’m used to, i’m keen to hear them.

thanks for your write up

In any case, for my usage, gnome-terminal is completely useless. Konsole is a little better, it does perhaps a dozen screen updates, but it still is no match for the *much* faster rendering of XTerm (rxvt is probably just as good as XTerm, if you don’t need the Tektronix emulation