gnome-terminal is sluggish when scrolling

[Hendrik Lönngren]

Binary package hint: gnome-terminal

When using vi in gnome-terminal, scrolling one line down takes about one second, which is much too long. This is most apparent when the window is fullscreen. Also happens when using less. xterm does not have these problems.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: gnome-terminal 2.26.0-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-020630rc5-generic i686

[Hendrik Lönngren (hendrik0)]

Forgot to mention, I have an "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)".

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for the report Hendrik, do you get the same issue with terminator? it could be a vte issue.

[Hendrik Lönngren (hendrik0)]

Yes, terminator is also slow.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

reassigning to vte for now then.

[Hendrik Lönngren (hendrik0)]

Actually, it is more like 2 seconds when in fullscreen mode. Also, the terminal slows down processes with lots of output, such as, e.g., pdflatex. When I do "time locate -i bild", which has about 1500 lines of output, in fullscreen mode, the result is

real 0m10.040s
user 0m0.936s
sys 0m0.020s

In "quarter-screen mode", I get

real 0m6.407s
user 0m0.872s
sys 0m0.024s

Is there anything I can do to help finding out what causes this?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

you might want to send it to bugzilla.gnome.org where the software authors can read about it, they might know what causes the issue there.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version.Thanks in advance.

[Mathieu Rousseau (mathieu-rousseau-31)]

It still happens! I have unbuntu up to date. To reproduce, just open a few terminals in each desktop... It is really annoying

[bendikro (bendikro)]

I experience the same issue. After system boot, everything is speedy.
Opening some treminals (3-5) with maybe 5-10 tabs each, the system gets very sluggish. Only a few of them actually has a lot of output (tail log files, and debug output from programs).

Just bought an Intel SSD disk, so this should not be a disk IO issue. gnome-termimal process uses 400MiB Memory.
Killing gnome-terminal makes the system fast again.

Eveything is slow, scrolling in Firefox, changing tabs, even writing in this text field is slow.

Running Ubuntu 12.10.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

vte-0.36 fixes this painfully slow speed.

The one-line fix (if you want to backport it to an older version) is at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721944#c4