[Gllug] Transparent Terminal

[Tethys]

George Wright writes:

>Regarding speed, Konq loads quicker here than Firefox does.

Perhaps in some alternate universe, but not in mine. Part of that, I suspect,
is Konqueror starting up all sorts of KDE nonsense I'm not interested in
(which not running KDE, I don't already have loaded). All I want is a
browser.

>As for xterms vs Konsole, read Aaron Seigo's blog about it at
>http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2004/10/konsole-vs-xterm-or-proof-that-kde-is.html

I did a similar test a few months ago with a range of terminals, and
rxvt and xterm came out much lower than the others. Interestingly,
gnome-terminal had the smallest incremental cost for adding a new tab.
But using tabbed terminals (unlike tabbed browsing) doesn't fit my way
of working, and the inital bloat was huge anyway. My testing showed that
I could have 14 rxvts before memory usage overtook konsole (my current
desktop has 5 open, including the the temporary one being used to compose
this message). As It happens, I've since switched to xterm, which is a bit
fatter due to Tektronix support, amongst other things, as it handles
utf-8 better (yes, I now know about urxvt, which I'll look at when I get
some time). 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 xterm -e /bin/date
   
   real    0m0.081s
   user    0m0.059s
   sys     0m0.021s
   isengard:~% time konsole -e /bin/date
   
   real    0m0.524s
   user    0m0.245s
   sys     0m0.073s
   isengard:~% time gnome-terminal -e /bin/date
   
   real    0m0.802s
   user    0m0.180s
   sys     0m0.067s

This is with a hot cache for all terms (first invocation was truly
horrible -- 4.5s for gnome-terminal, and a massive 10.2s for konsole).
Using wall time (i.e., the response time as seen by me, a user), xterm
and rxvt are usable, and the other two aren't. Repeated invocations
vary the times by perhaps +/- 15. That's not FUD, it's just the way
it is.

Also try a "time cat /etc/termcap". Admittedly, konsole does reasonably
well here (better, even, than xterm), but still nearly an order of
magnitude slower than rxvt.

Tet
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