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Rakete1111

Member

Registered: 2018-05-26

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Terminal output is slow using Terminator

My terminal output speeds have been pretty good since like forever, but today, I noticed a noticeable drop in stdout performance.

I use i3wm, Terminator (although the same issue happens with xfce4-terminal). I don't know if it's coincidental or not, but earlier today I installed Polybar with a theme and themed my Terminator. I also use OMZ with Powerline.

So what happens is that stdout performance is very slow. I ran htop and notice a small +2% (from 0.1%) CPU core activity increase when I continuously press the [Enter] key on my terminal. The process is either Terminator running with Python2 or a Xorg process (the complete name is "/usr/lib/Xorg -nolisten tcp :0 vt1 -keeeptty -auth /tmp/serverauth.x6xlx3INYX" - don't know what it does). iotop doesn't report any significant harddrive activity (just Chrome and then nothing) and besides, I have an NVMe SSD, so speed shouldn't be a problem I believe.

When I continuously press the [Enter] key on my terminal, I expected to see a continuous shell prompt for each line, but instead, due to the CPU spike, there is some space in-between (just to illustrate the lag). For reference, I have an i7, so my CPU should be fine.

Does anyone have an idea on what could be the cause?

Also: xfce4-terminal suffers from the same problem, and reverting Polybar to the default bar doesn't help. Not starting i3 at all also doesn't help for some reason (the default shell is also slow).

Last edited by Rakete1111 (2018-09-19 06:18:15)

Rakete1111

Member

Registered: 2018-05-26

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Terminal output is slow using Terminator

And I solved it. On htop I saw sometimes bzr and hg pop out, which I found weird, because I'm only pressing [Enter]. I don't even use them at all, so I uninstalled them, along with anything else (-Rns). That fixed the issue immediately.