Terminator

terminator performance ( sluggish )

Asked by centyx

I've just started using terminator yesterday at home and at work. I like it so far, but input/ouput is relatively sluggish. Flipping between screens in GNU screen, and even typing and moving the cursor in vim is delayed.

Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks!

Here is some system information:

Dell Dimension 3000 w/ p4 2.8ghz 2gb memory intel 82865G onboard video
Ubuntu 8.10, gnome + metacity, ( tried w/ xgl disabled, no difference )
Terminator 0.12 release using dpkg-buildpackage

Dell Dimension 4600 w/ p4 2.6ghz 1gb memory intel 82865G onboard video
Ubuntu 8.10, gnome + metacity
Terminator from this morning's bzr built using dpkg-buildpackage

This sluggishness is rather unbearable, particularly compared to my usual urxvtc/d.

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Revision history for this message
centyx (centyx-centyx) said : 		#1

I might add, according to top, there is under %50 cpu and memory utilitzed and load is under 1.

Terminator is using approximately 40M res and 128M virtual according to top.

Here is my terminator config:

maximise = true
titlebars = false
close_button_on_tab = false
scrollback_lines = 500
font = smoothansi

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Chris Jones (cmsj) said : 		#2

Is GNOME Terminal performing similarly slowly? We use the same terminal widget that they do, so in theory the performance should be very similar.

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centyx (centyx-centyx) said : 		#3

Yes, sorry, I hadn't thought of that. I've just tried gnome-terminal maximized and it is behaving similarly.

Issue only appears when maximized. I don't have transparency enabled.

I'll search google and Ubuntu forums and see what I can find.

Thanks!

Revision history for this message
Chris Jones (cmsj) said : 		#4

I would guess that your screen resolution is quite large - I too have found that the VTE widget (the name of the widget used by both GNOME Terminal and Terminator) performs quite poorly when it is 1024x768 or larger.
Unfortunately there's not really a great deal we can do about it, other than file bugs on bugzilla.gnome.org and hope the nice developers there are able to improve matters.

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centyx (centyx-centyx) said : 		#5

1280x1024. Yes, after looking for a bit I see that this appears to be a common issue.

What I would really love to see is something similar to Terminator in concept that makes use of urxvtd.

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centyx (centyx-centyx) said : 		#6

FWIW, I decided to try a different font. I switched from my fixed width smoothansi ( from artwiz-aleczapka ) to Inconsolata 10 and performance has improved a great deal. The font looks rather ugly, however, with pink and green bleeding about the edges of some of the characters. 12 looks OK, but is way too large. I have tried adjusting the DPI in Gnome's appearance/font settings dialog, but without success.

Anyhow, I know this is a bit off topic, but maybe this will help someone else.

I'll post back if I resolve the blurriness.

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centyx (centyx-centyx) said : 		#7

Ultimately I switched to terminus 8 and performance still isn't optimal, but it looks nice and it's not nearly as sluggish as with smoothansi ( from artwiz-aleczapka ).