Performance benchmarks

Terminal apps selected for these benchmarks

We chose to benchmark Warp against 4 other terminal emulator applications, based on their popularity as well as language and principles. Here is the list of the applications we chose for this comparison together with the explanation as to why we decided to include it in our comparison:

• Terminal.app - the default terminal app available on the macOS;
• ITerm2 - one of the most popular terminal emulators used by macOS users;
• Alacritty & WezTerm - both of those terminals are written in Rust and are well-known for their speed and overall performance, things that Warp is aiming for.

Versions & settings used during the comparison

Terminal	Version	Terminal size (cols / rows, window is identical pixel-wise)
Warp	v0.2022.04.01.01.37.stable_03	208 cols / 54 rows
Terminal.app	Version 2.11 (440)	188 cols / 72 rows
iTerm2	Build 3.4.15	211 cols / 78 rows
Alacritty	alacritty 0.10.1 (2844606)	286 cols / 102 rows
Wezterm	20220319-142410-0fcdea07	243 cols / 80 rows

About benchmarks

We link the source code of each benchmark used, so you can easily reproduce the tests with other terminal apps. Please, note that those benchmarks are not exhaustive. Comparing terminal emulators with each other is not an easy task - right now we’re checking how each of the apps behaves when dealing with lots of input and/or output.

Ideally, the benchmarks would also cover the latency (time between pressing a key and the character showing on the screen, but also a delay between the user’s input and communication with the shell). We may include tests that account for that in the future.

VTE benchmark

Benchmark code can be found here with the specific commit we used in our comparison: 93bcc32b6e0f7560e9b1a5a8b0998c04fbf9b50d. Results in milliseconds.

Average time for each of the benchmark tests

	Warp avg (ms)	Terminal.app avg (ms)	iTerm avg	Alacritty avg	WezTerm avg
dense_cells	43.88	24.91	144.84	7.25	28.15
scrolling	30.06	283.34	1257.57	31.75	687.77
scrolling_bottom_region	117.34	257.23	1294.25	29.1	672.67
scrolling_bottom_small_region	114.52	227.75	1251	25.98	669.93
scrolling_fullscreen	37.4	307.03	1565.17	37.36	1205
scrolling_top_region	120.63	209.29	2212.2	84.42	682.6
scrolling_top_small_region	114.64	205.59	1216.33	21.91	663.44
unicode	66.47	34.45	93.01	16.78	1279.25

P90 of the results

	Warp p90	Terminal.app p90	iTerm p90	Alacritty p90	WezTerm p90
dense_cells	52	28	189	8	32
scrolling	32	266.76	1336	32	707
scrolling_bottom_region	170	243	1398	30	686
scrolling_bottom_small_region	167	224	1331	30	679
scrolling_fullscreen	38	327	1593	41	1208
scrolling_top_region	178	222	2243	85	686
scrolling_top_small_region	167	222	1314	30	666
unicode	77	39	90	20	3883

Termbench

Benchmark code can be found here with the specific commit we used in our comparison: 82afbc69256b4e22de913f0f02f82e0480f3dac5.

Below you’ll find results for small and regular test sizes. Note that Terminal.app only participated in the small test. Results in seconds.

Small test sizes

	Warp small (s)	Terminal.app small (s)	iTerm small (s)	Alacritty small	WezTerm small
ManyLine	6.7854	2.6789	8.7057	1.2532	8.9436
LongLine	9.0033	1.6473	9.0849	0.8179	11.4587
FGPerChar	1.3716	453.9888	2.6625	0.2788	0.6487
FGBGPerChar	2.8403	908.894	4.5881	0.5931	0.7283
overall result	20.0006	1367.209	25.0413	2.943	21.7793

Regular test size

	Warp regular (s)	iTerm regular (s)	Alacritty regular (s)	WezTerm regular
ManyLine	113.76	132.4975	19.8802	150.8175
LongLine	155.0937	126.7561	12.7859	207.3647
FGPerChar	21.8928	39.3352	4.2925	9.4265
FGBGPerChar	46.312	50.5369	8.418	13.5142
overall result	337.0585	349.1258	45.3767	381.1229