The GNOME Terminal is very slow in GNOME 3

Solution 1:

I have the exact same problem. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen a majority of the time and I hate it. Also, text prints very slowly in the terminal. So if I print out a large number of characters, the terminal spits it out in jumps and increments. It's very laggy. This is a major issue.

UPDATE: I press alt-f2, then hit "r" to reset Gnome. Your session remains intact, but it reboots Gnome, and then my terminals work very nicely...so this is a memory leak or bug in Gnome.

Solution 2:

I have not experienced this issue. You may want to try an alternative terminal emulator such as xterm or uxterm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terminal_emulators#X_Window_Terminals

Solution 3:

Do you use NVIDIA drivers? Then you might be affected an bug in the driver. The new 295.20 release states a potential fix:

Fixed a bug that could cause some OpenGL applications (including desktop environments like KDE and GNOME Shell) to hang.

EDIT: An more in-depth discussion if found at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/78237/unity-3d-with-nvidia-driver-becomes-very-slow-and-laggy

Solution 4:

I have found terminator, my favorite term, has the same problem creating or switching tabs. It makes Gnome 3 unusable. I usually have somewhere in the range of 4 or 5 tabs of console open with each one possibly split many times. Sometimes creating new tabs causes the entire Gnome 3 UI to freeze, and the only way to get back in is restart gdm from one of the actual consoles (ctrl+alt+f1)