🚀 termbench

termbench is a fast, scriptable benchmarking tool focused on measuring PTY read performance in terminal emulators — perfect for comparing how different terminals handle massive streams of output.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This benchmark does not provide a complete overview of terminal performance. It only evaluates how quickly a terminal reads from the PTY, and does not consider:

• Frame rate
• Input latency
• Rendering performance

📌 Do not draw broad conclusions from these results unless you're familiar with how PTY internals work.

🧪 Getting Started

To run all default benchmarks (after setting up a Rust toolchain):

cargo run --release

Benchmarks are located in the ./benchmarks/ directory and are defined as folders containing:

• benchmark – the main executable (required)
• setup – optional executable for one-time setup

termbench will read the stdout of each benchmark and repeat its output to ensure a meaningful sample size.

📊 Plotting Results

You can visualize your benchmark results using gnuplot.

1. Generate a .dat file:

cargo run --release -- --dat results.dat

2. Generate a summary SVG plot:

./gnuplot/summary.sh results.dat output.svg

3. Combine multiple results:

./gnuplot/summary.sh *.dat output.svg

4. Detailed per-benchmark plots:

./gnuplot/detailed.sh *.dat output/

🧩 Adding Your Own Benchmarks

Want to contribute or test your own scenarios?

1. Create a new folder inside ./benchmarks/
2. Add a benchmark executable (and optionally setup)
3. Ensure your benchmark writes to stdout
4. Keep setup-only logic in the setup executable

📬 Feel free to submit a pull request with useful or interesting benchmarks — especially ones that highlight differences between terminal versions or emulators.

📎 License

MIT or Apache 2.0 – choose whichever suits you.

🙌 Credits

Originally inspired by efforts to stress-test terminal performance in real-world workloads.

Built with 💙 by the StarTerm team.