OT: Why planet gnome doesn't tell all the truth?

[Xavier Otazu]

 	Hi!

Today I've read a post on planet gnome claiming that the new gnome 
terminal v2.14 is faster than xterm. The obtained results, executing 
"time cat /usr/share/dict/words", are

xterm: 4.3 sec
gnome term v2.12: 3.1 sec
gnome term v2.14: 1.0 sec

I know that many factors may change results, and that the data I obtained 
may be refused with many arguments ... but I liked to reproduce this 
experiment.

I performed the same experiment simultaneously on XFCE 4.2.3.2, Gnome 2.6 
and KDE 3.4 (Xfce is the only one I've compiled from source, and Gnome and 
KDE were installed from Slackware 10.2 packages). The terminals I used 
were rxvt v2.7.10, xterm, gnome-terminal v2.6.1 (alias gterm) and konsole 
1.5.2.

I think using different terminals in different window managers may give a 
clue about managers performance and sinergies between managers and their 
respective terminals.

Here I post the results for every terminal and environtment (I executed 
the command five times:

              XFCE        KDE        GNOME
              ====       =====       =====

            0:00.84     0:01.05     0:01.12
            0:00.86     0:01.08     0:01.11
rxvt       0:00.84     0:01.07     0:01.10
            0:00.86     0:01.06     0:01.11
            0:00.85     0:01.08     0:01.09


            0:01.85     0:02.64     0:02.75
            0:01.91     0:02.59     0:02.66
xterm      0:01.78     0:02.63     0:02.63
            0:01.80     0:02.73     0:02.56
            0:01.80     0:02.60     0:02.56


            0:01.33     0:01.90     0:01.36
            0:01.34     0:01.41     0:01.41
gterm      0:01.34     0:01.36     0:01.34
            0:01.37     0:01.36     0:01.38
            0:01.37     0:01.41     0:01.39


            0:00.62     0:00.80     0:00.68
            0:00.61     0:00.79     0:00.65
konsole    0:00.59     0:00.83     0:00.65
            0:00.59     0:00.83     0:00.65
            0:00.59     0:00.83     0:00.69



What are the conclusions?

- Konsole is always faster than gterm. Why planet gnome guys do not post a 
comparison with its most direct competitor? ... :-(

- xterm is always the slower

- rxvt is always the faster

- xfce is always the faster


I love the last conclusion ! ;-) ... but may be it is because it was 
compiled from source.


Final conclusion: Any suposed objective test that claims that the poster 
is better than the rest, has to be taken with a "most" of salt ... even if 
they are the gnome guys. (This attitude remembers me of Microsoft) ... :-(



cheers

Xavier