Shell in Emacs - Performance

Some of my coworkers use Eshell inside emacs as their main terminal emulator. I had a little bit of envy, so I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I’m not going to use it as my main shell. At least not yet.

How fast can you print? #

What is the issue then? — performance. I’ve run a build which outputs a lot of, mostly useless, warnings to the terminal. And boy, it took ages.

One can expect that outputting text in emacs maybe slower than in a dedicated terminal emulator. But how much slower — is it just a small annoyance or can it eat precious minutes while waiting for chatty commands to finish?

I’ve found a interesting post, Terminal and shell performance, where the author measures how much latency is added by different terminals between pressing a key and seeing the letter on-screen. Towards the end of the article he also suggests a simple method of measuring terminal bandwidth when it comes to the speed of printing text:XS

timeout 64 sh -c 'cat /dev/urandom | base32 > junk.txt'

and then running

timeout 8 sh -c 'cat junk.txt | tee junk.term_name'

On MacOS, you actually need install gnu coreutils to get timeout and base32. I’ve installed it via homebrew so I need to prefix the utils with g-.

First we generate a stream of random junk.txt

$ gtimeout 1 sh -c 'cat /dev/urandom | gbase32 > junk.txt'
$ ls -lah | grep junk.txt
.rw-r--r--  1.7G igor  6 Dec 23:59  junk.txt

Next, we print it on various terminals for 8 seconds and at the same time write to a file.

$ gtimeout 8 sh -c 'cat junk.txt | tee junk.<terminal-name>'

Then we can simply compare the size of the files and estimate printing throughput based on that.

Results #

I’ve tested standard MacOS terminal emulator, iTerm2 and emacs' M-x shell and Eshell.

The results are not super scientific, as I had just one run, so take them with a grain of salt. Having said that, boy the differences are huge.

.rw-r--r--  245k igor  7 Dec  0:04 junk.eshell
.rw-r--r--   87M igor  7 Dec  0:02 junk.iterm
.rw-r--r--  195M igor  7 Dec  0:03 junk.macosterminal
.rw-r--r--  245k igor  7 Dec  0:03 junk.mxshell

Final comments #

If you’re into chatty builds, then go with the default terminal emulator. Arguably, the build I mention here is misconfigured. The warnings can (and should) be printed only if they are actionable. And the actionable ones should be fixed. Nevertheless, since I spend so much time in the terminal I will encounter chatty scripts in the future. The tool should be able to handle the reality not the other way round.

Note that, there are aspects other than the throughput. According to the post linked above, Eshell has quite small and consistent latency. It is quite snappy when it needs to send sigkill. Plus, you get all the benefits of emacs and elisp. This may be more important to some than the throughput.

There are optimizations that can be made to speed emacs text rendering, but I haven’t tried them yet. Anecdotal evidence suggests they won’t improve the throughput 400 times.