On: Terminal and shell performance

[diggan]

Fun test to check how fast the terminal can handle loads of text, run "time head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom"

On a MacBookPro11,1 - 2,8 GHz this shows:

iTerm2: 2.182 total

iTerm2 with tmux: 0.860 total

terminal.app: 0.135 total

terminal.app with tmux: 0.910 total

Surprisingly, iTerm2 is faster with tmux than terminal.app is with tmux. But terminal.app without tmux is the fastest.

Anyone knows why the performance with tmux is so different between the both terminals?

[rcthompson → diggan]

Maybe tmux doesn't pass the full text through to the terminal, and 0.9 seconds is how long tmux takes to work its way through the buffer.

[RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u → diggan]

Incidentally, while still fast enough for this test, /dev/[u]random is not very fast on macOS: ~15 MiB/s on my MBP.

[mbernstein → diggan]

My iTerm2 is taking 17s vs. 0.3s for Terminal.app. Any idea why yours is an order of magnitude faster?

[diggan → mbernstein]

Hm, have the same CPU? Was tested with build 3.0.15