Sluggish performance in ubuntu terminal?

Question

I work on two 1900x1200 monitors, usually with at least one monitor running a fullscreen terminal window. I use a font size of Ubuntu mono 10.

I have noticed that performance is sluggish (I am using an i7, 16gb ram, etc.). For example, when I run ls on a large local directory, the text wobbles down over a second or so. Running the same command from a TTY terminal or reducing the size of the tmux pane in which the command is run makes the same command run almost instantly.

What can I do to improve the performance of the ubuntu terminal? Or are there better performing alternatives to the default? I am using Ubuntu 14.04.

Answer 1

Does your problem reproduce under different conditions?

Can you reproduce the problem under different conditions and benchmark the time it takes to perform various operations (ex: time cat largefile.txt). Example scenarios:

• using GNU screen instead of tmux;
• without using a terminal multiplexor;
• using another terminal emulator (tilda, terminator, rxvt or xterm for example);
• using a different font such as Envy Code R, DejaVu Mono or Droid Sans Mono;

I personally like tilda quite a lot as a terminal emulator (fullscreen and all) and don't experience any kind of performance problems. You can bind it to a hotkey like Ctrl + `, similar to the terminal in Quake.

I'm sure you can get a lot more scientific with SystemTap or Valgrind, but depends how much effort you want to invest in this...