3 ms·
Can anyone explain why a terminal needs "speed"? Isn't the limiting factor the typing and reading speed of the human in front of it?
by mseepgood 3y ago
Can anyone explain why a terminal needs "speed"? Isn't the limiting factor the typing and reading speed of the human in front of it?
- boxed 3y agoNot if you're tailing log files.
- vermilingua 3y agoNo, because the human does not need to process the entire screen contents with every frame, only the delta from the last frame (usually). Therefore getting those deltas into eyeballs as quickly as possible increases how quickly the human can interact with the computer.
- ufo 3y agoThis is more about responsiveness than batch-processing speed.
- dale_glass 3y agoThere are cases where this makes a big difference. For a dramatic example, consider the VESA framebuffer console, a slow serial link, or a bad SSH connection with a good CPU on the other end. With enough terminal output it will bottleneck whatever you're doing. Sometimes extremely dramatically so. To the point of adding hours to a task in really bad cases. For such situations, it often helps a lot to run remote tasks in something like screen and only switch to it to check progress once in a while.
- easytiger 3y ago> With enough terminal output it will bottleneck whatever you're doing. Sometimes extremely dramatically so. To the point of adding hours to a task in really bad cases. At the very laziest &> foo your output. Or preferably add logging to your application. Go back 20 years and you wouldn't have had the luxury of spewing hundreds of megabytes of text to a remote terminal for no reason.
- Takennickname 3y agoMakes using them more enjoyable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miohtama 3y agoIt only matters to a certain point. After the latency is below some threshold it no longer matters. However because how Linux graphics system was developed, there is a lot of extra latency and bad software out there, so it might be noticeable.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoThe reason is that the limiting factor absolutely should be the human, so if the computer is slow enough that the human can possibly notice it, it needs to be 10x faster.
- lupusreal 3y agoIt's mostly just a matter of comfort. Characters appearing very quickly after you type them is more comfortable.
- pilcha 3y agoLower input lag enables flow state. Can't explain it. You have to feel it.
- audidude 3y agoHi, I'm the author of almost all of those VTE performance improvements. I wrote them because the latency in gnome-terminal, which I've used for well over twenty years, was starting to make me miss-type due to how slow the feedback was on Wayland. Simple as that.