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drewrobb

Member

Registered: 2010-08-03

Posts: 2

XFT fonts + color escape sequences really slow

Is anyone still having this issue with color escape sequences? I'm seeing a huge slowdown when I use xft fonts and color escape sequences in my terminal. I'm running xorg 1.9, and I found similar results on a computer running Nvidia binary driver as well as an ATI machine.

With color:
time seq  -s `echo -e "\033[32mGreen\033[0m"` -f "%g" 100000

Xterm, no custom settings: 0.429s
urxvt, default font: 0.481s
urxvt, xft:inconsolata-10:antialias=false: 30.710s
urxvt, xft:inconsolata-10:antialias=true: even worse, didn't wait

No color:
time seq  -s `echo -e "White"` -f "%g" 100000

Xterm, no custom settings: 0.173s
urxvt, default font: 0.160s
urxvt, xft:inconsolata-10:antialias=false: 0.158s
urxvt, xft:inconsolata-10:antialias=true: 0.3877s

Could someone who uses xft try some of these benchmarks?

Edit: It is the changing escape sequences that are the problem, printing only text of a different color is fast.

Last edited by drewrobb (2011-02-15 23:41:27)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: XFT fonts + color escape sequences really slow

'time seq  -s `echo -e "White"` -f "%g" 100000' run for 26 seconds here - the cpu meter in htop was maxed.
'time seq  -s `echo -e "\033[32mGreen\033[0m"` -f "%g" 100000' took over a minute.
I'm using

urxvt*font:     -*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

xterm with default font was fast in both cases.

Last edited by karol (2011-02-16 00:00:23)