Clarification: 189x24 with the initial printout was fast -- about 2.8s.
Changing the printout to include the line number made it slow.


** Description changed:

  Binary package hint: libvte9
  
  This refers to the Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy version of vte (0.16.9). However, I
  just built vte 0.16.13 (hardy), and the bug remains (I made sure it was
  using the right library using strace). I refer to gnome-terminal in the
  rest of the bug, but I get the exact same behavior in xfce4-terminal,
  and in the vte test app.
  
  Here's an experiment, done on an idle system (Pentium M 2 Ghz, 1GB RAM),
  with gnome-terminal in the foreground, maximized. My font setup is
  monospace 12, with subpixel antialiasing. My scrollback is 5000 lines.
  
  $ resize
  COLUMNS=191;
  LINES=57;
  export COLUMNS LINES;
  $ date > XXX; time (for ((i=0;i<1000;++i)); do echo 
{a,b}{b,c}{c,a}{d,a}{q,f,e}{z,c,s}; done; echo _all_)
  [snip]
  _all_
  
  real    1m30.833s
  user    0m0.596s
  sys     0m0.012s
  $ date
  Mon May 12 02:33:08 EDT 2008
  $ cat XXX
  Mon May 12 02:31:26 EDT 2008
  
  I typed "date" while it was scrolling, and as soon as it finished, I hit
  "Enter". As you can see, "time" lies about the wall time a bit, because
  the rendering is so horrendously slow. According to my "date"
  measurement, the wall time is actually 1:42. My reaction time is not
  that slow (see "konsole" experiment below).
  
  Timings of the same experiment (I report the "time" value because it's
  easier): 80x24 -- 1.2s, 80x59 -- 3s, 130x24 -- 1.8s, 191x24 -- 35s,
  181x24 -- 2.5s, 186x24 -- 2.5s, 190x24 -- 30s.
  
  But, if I change the string being printed (e.g. by replacing "echo ..."
  with "echo $i ..."), then 189x24 suddenly becomes slow again (16s).
  Maybe it depends on the pattern of spaces/newlines in the text being
  displayed?
  
  This manifests itself when I edit wide files, or cat a wide file, and
  page through it. In both cases, refreshes can sometimes take as long as
  5-7 seconds, even when I'm simply paging through the scrollback with
  Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown. It seems to depend quite a bit on the
  data -- again, I'm surmising something having to do with newlines or
  spaces?
  
  In fact, on the various wide data files on my disk, I feel slowness down
  to terminal width 120, at which point it abruptly disappears.
  
  I repeated the above experiments a couple of times -- the times are
  fairly consistent. It did not seem to matter whether I used gnome-
  terminal --geometry, or resized the window after startup.
  
  Now, for the really weird thing. On my screen, 191x24 is almost the full
  width of the screen. If I change to 6 point font, and maximize the
  window to 383x112, none of these problems occur. The widest files feel
  snappy, and messing with newline/space patterns doesn't change that.
  
  Keeping the window maximized, 8pt -- still snappy, 10pt -- slight hint
  of slowness, but perfectly usable, 11pt -- noticeable slowness in some
  cases, but still under a second per refresh, 12pt -- catastrophically
  bad.
  
  Repeating the original 191x57 experiment in konsole (I set it up so that
  it renders pixel-identical to the gnome-terminal):
  
  real    0m1.799s
  user    0m0.588s
  sys     0m0.020s
- [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/pain-genotyping$ date
+ $ date
  Mon May 12 02:38:35 EDT 2008
- [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/pain-genotyping$ cat XXX
+ $ cat XXX
  Mon May 12 02:38:32 EDT 2008
  
  Moreover, none of this slow refresh behavior is reproducible in konsole.
  It's not as fast as gnome-terminal at its fastest, but it is very
  consistent.
  
  No other applications that display text have these sorts of issues.
  
  So this is sort of a puzzler... I think it would be fascinating to know
  the cause. And even better to have it fixed :)

** Description changed:

  Binary package hint: libvte9
  
  This refers to the Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy version of vte (0.16.9). However, I
  just built vte 0.16.13 (hardy), and the bug remains (I made sure it was
  using the right library using strace). I refer to gnome-terminal in the
  rest of the bug, but I get the exact same behavior in xfce4-terminal,
  and in the vte test app.
  
  Here's an experiment, done on an idle system (Pentium M 2 Ghz, 1GB RAM),
  with gnome-terminal in the foreground, maximized. My font setup is
  monospace 12, with subpixel antialiasing. My scrollback is 5000 lines.
  
  $ resize
  COLUMNS=191;
  LINES=57;
  export COLUMNS LINES;
  $ date > XXX; time (for ((i=0;i<1000;++i)); do echo 
{a,b}{b,c}{c,a}{d,a}{q,f,e}{z,c,s}; done; echo _all_)
  [snip]
  _all_
  
  real    1m30.833s
  user    0m0.596s
  sys     0m0.012s
  $ date
  Mon May 12 02:33:08 EDT 2008
  $ cat XXX
  Mon May 12 02:31:26 EDT 2008
  
  I typed "date" while it was scrolling, and as soon as it finished, I hit
  "Enter". As you can see, "time" lies about the wall time a bit, because
  the rendering is so horrendously slow. According to my "date"
  measurement, the wall time is actually 1:42. My reaction time is not
  that slow (see "konsole" experiment below).
  
  Timings of the same experiment (I report the "time" value because it's
  easier): 80x24 -- 1.2s, 80x59 -- 3s, 130x24 -- 1.8s, 191x24 -- 35s,
- 181x24 -- 2.5s, 186x24 -- 2.5s, 190x24 -- 30s.
+ 181x24 -- 2.5s, 186x24 -- 2.5s, 189x24 -- 2.8s, 190x24 -- 30s.
  
  But, if I change the string being printed (e.g. by replacing "echo ..."
  with "echo $i ..."), then 189x24 suddenly becomes slow again (16s).
  Maybe it depends on the pattern of spaces/newlines in the text being
  displayed?
  
  This manifests itself when I edit wide files, or cat a wide file, and
  page through it. In both cases, refreshes can sometimes take as long as
  5-7 seconds, even when I'm simply paging through the scrollback with
  Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown. It seems to depend quite a bit on the
  data -- again, I'm surmising something having to do with newlines or
  spaces?
  
  In fact, on the various wide data files on my disk, I feel slowness down
  to terminal width 120, at which point it abruptly disappears.
  
  I repeated the above experiments a couple of times -- the times are
  fairly consistent. It did not seem to matter whether I used gnome-
  terminal --geometry, or resized the window after startup.
  
  Now, for the really weird thing. On my screen, 191x24 is almost the full
  width of the screen. If I change to 6 point font, and maximize the
  window to 383x112, none of these problems occur. The widest files feel
  snappy, and messing with newline/space patterns doesn't change that.
  
  Keeping the window maximized, 8pt -- still snappy, 10pt -- slight hint
  of slowness, but perfectly usable, 11pt -- noticeable slowness in some
  cases, but still under a second per refresh, 12pt -- catastrophically
  bad.
  
  Repeating the original 191x57 experiment in konsole (I set it up so that
  it renders pixel-identical to the gnome-terminal):
  
  real    0m1.799s
  user    0m0.588s
  sys     0m0.020s
  $ date
  Mon May 12 02:38:35 EDT 2008
  $ cat XXX
  Mon May 12 02:38:32 EDT 2008
  
  Moreover, none of this slow refresh behavior is reproducible in konsole.
  It's not as fast as gnome-terminal at its fastest, but it is very
  consistent.
  
  No other applications that display text have these sorts of issues.
  
  So this is sort of a puzzler... I think it would be fascinating to know
  the cause. And even better to have it fixed :)

-- 
Wide text in wide VTE windows is extremely slow
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/229465
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Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to vte in ubuntu.

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