Benchmark : Which is the best Linux terminal ?

It has many times occurred to me which terminal among the plethora of terminals at our disposal are the most efficient in terms of speed, memory consumption and ease of use. And I was of the opinion that the ubiquitous xterm was a likely candidate for a terminal with less memory footprint. Well I couldn't have been further from the truth.

It seems xterm is a very poor choice when selecting a terminal. Martin Ankerl benchmarked a number of terminals available in Linux including xterm, gnome-terminal, KDE konsole, wterm, eterm and aterm. And his findings indicate gnome-terminal and konsole as the best choice of terminals for its speed. And by speed I mean the speed of execution of commands in it and not the program's startup time. But the down side is that these two terminals consume a significant amount of memory. For example, Gnome-terminal is found to consume around 45 MB.

Martin states that he found wterm as the best bet for a low memory footprint with just 6.5 MB consumption. And it is sufficiently fast in executing. xterm loses in this department too with each instance consuming around 16 MB.

Do read the full benchmark details and also a nifty graph of his results.

Benchmark : Performance comparisons of various Filesystems under Linux

If you are asked to list the types of filesystems supported in Linux, I am sure you will be able to list quite a few of them. But when it comes to listing the pros and cons with respect to the performance of these filesystems in Linux, one is not so sure right? This may be because not many have benchmarked these filesystems and published their findings online.

Now things have changed though, because Justin Piszcz has written a two part series listing his findings regarding how each filesystem fared performance wise under Linux. He has published his findings for Linux kernel 2.4 as well as 2.6 .

The filesystems that were included in the benchmark were EXT2, EXT3, JFS, ReiserFS v3, ReiserFS v4 and XFS . To arrive at a conclusion, he performed 17 different tests which included creating 1000's of files on the filesystem and cat'ing a huge file (1 GB) to /dev/null among other things.

So what is the verdict ?

The author has concluded that XFS is the best filesystem in terms of performance and scalability though JFS has improved in some of the tests. And the surprise of all, ReiserFS is the slowest in most of the tests. But I think it would be prudent to read the article first and arrive at your own conclusions.