The built-in Xfce4-terminal takes the longest amount of time to show up when compared to two other emulators i tried: Termit and XTerm. In particular, Xfce4-terminal takes a full second to show up, Termit comes second at about 0.6 seconds and XTerm starts in 0.4 seconds. The system is a Debian 9.1+Xfce+Xfs installed in an old, weak laptop with a 1ghz processor (supposedly 1.333 ghz with amd turbo core, but i was unable to make it work on debian... i digress.). However, all of the above timings including the fastest one are unacceptably slow. A terminal window should launch in a millisecond even on precambrian hardware. The culprit is CPU usage which peaks in all cases. I noticed the terminal is not the only program that has this problem tho. Even Mousepad starts in slightly less than a second (0.8 secs) whereas Leafpad takes about as much time as XTerm at 0.4 secs. So i suspect this is a generalized problem to all xfce apps, or actually all apps in general, as i consider1/10 of a second to be slow already, but i cannot possibly know this for certain.
Hi, please specify the terminal version that you're using. I'm not sure what I can do here... For me, the terminal starts instantly on all my systems, including VMs. How much RAM does your machine have? Do other vte-based terminal apps, such as gnome-terminal, start slowly?
Hi Igor Sure thing, here's more info on my system. It's an Aspire One 725 that i upgraded to 4GB of ram and replaced the hdd with a ocz vertex3 ssd. Just installed gnome-terminal and it turns out it starts exactly as slow as xfce4-terminal, about 1 second. Notice: for both, only the first window is slow to boot. Opening multiple terminal windows while keeping one open is faster but only for subsequent windows. This is very evident on gnome-terminal and less for xfce4-terminal but still noticeable. I would suggest to try to limit your vm to a much lower cpu frequency if possible. Versions (all from official debian repos): xfce4-terminal: 0.8.3 gnome-terminal: 3.22.2 Termit: 3.0-1+b1 XTerm: 327-2 mousepad: 0.4.0 leafpad: 0.8.18.1
I just switched to Debian Testing, hoping the issue would go away with more up-to-date packages: xfce4-terminal: 0.8.5.1 gnome-terminal: 3.22.2-1 Termit: 3.0-1+b1 XTerm: 330-1 mousepad: 0.4.0-4 leafpad: 0.8.18.1-5 It didn't. Loading times remain constant across the board. Also Ristretto and nomacs start in a second and a half. gthumb and filezilla start in 4 seconds.