[Gllug] Transparent Terminal

[Nix]

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004, Tethys uttered the following:
>             But whatever the memory usage, you simply can't disguise the
> fact that konsole and gnome-terminal are very slow.
> 
>    isengard:~% time rxvt -e /bin/date
> 
>    real    0m0.022s
>    user    0m0.008s
>    sys     0m0.013s
[...]
>    isengard:~% time konsole -e /bin/date
>    
>    real    0m0.524s
>    user    0m0.245s
>    sys     0m0.073s

That's a deeply silly test. Of *course* konsole has a higher
initialization overhead than rxvt: it's got DCOP registration and who
knows what else to do: hell, it's implemented in terms of a reuable
terminal KPart with a shell wrapped around it: of *course* initializing
one of those is more expensive than firing up a program that's so
paranoid about trimness that it even avoids reading the X resource
databases because it eats too much RAM. Initializing Xft isn't that
cheap either.

But the common use case for terminal emulators is *not* `start one per
command'. It's `start one and work in it for some time'.


Even so, the RSS/VSZ figures are... disturbing. Both of these are
freshly-started, using the same nontransparent background pixmap (a 31K
fractal XPM image):

nix at hades 3 /home/nix% ps -o rss,vsz -C rxvt
 RSS   VSZ
1320  3556
[...]

nix at hades 7 /home/nix% ps -o rss,vsz -C konsole
 RSS   VSZ
15860 31904
[...]

My usual working desktop involves lots and lots of individual terminals
(one per fvwm viewport), although I expect to be using tabbing a lot now
that I have a tabbed terminal emulator. But if each instance eats 31Mb,
well, ouch. That's a bit hefty.  (I'm ignoring here the load of things
like kdeinit, the dcopserver and so on: they're amortized over many
users and not very fat in any case).

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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