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by saurik
764 days ago
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The issue is that usually these terminals mean "higher throughput" when they say "faster", not "lower latency". The lowest-latency terminal in every test is Xterm, often by a LOT. Alacritty for a long time was actually quite bad at latency--and notably had a high variance on its latency, which is particularly miserable--but I think it improved recently? From what I remember of these benchmarks, someone using urxvt isn't going to be impressed by the supposed speed of Alacritty, if we are talking latency (and I agree: we should be, and everyone should use Xterm, which is actually an insanely good terminal). As for throughput, I have lived in the terminal for decades, and as long as the various layers don't have massive buffers I honestly don't care how slow the terminal is: if I am dumping megabytes into my terminal backscroll I probably am going "oh shit" and am frantically hitting Ctrl-C... a slow terminal with a small buffer handles that almost immediately. I get the impression that there are maybe some use cases involving high-rate screen updates for apps that happen to run in consoles but are really GUIs... I don't use many of those and in fact try to avoid them, but I could maybe see an advantage for a high-throughput terminal to improve their simulated frame rate? |
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Also, by what metric is xterm so fast? I accept the idea that it is fast, even the fastest, but "a lot" seems suspicious to me. From the keyboard to the monitor, there is a lot of hardware and driver latency, I guess tens of milliseconds, so the effect of the terminal, should be relatively minor. I suspect xterm is so fast because the tool used to test it relies on the X server, and because xterm communicates with X directly, the latency will be really low from the point of view of X, but how is it end-to-end? Do we get the same results, with, say, Wayland?