I've been noticing for a while a huge delay when opening new tabs and windows on iTerm (or terminal.app). This would range from 3 to 7 seconds when opening a new tab. It was driving me nuts.
Log craziness
Turns out that for whatever reason login -fp username (the command that is executed when we open a new terminal), goes to the asl log directory and goes crazy reading all the files. Quick fix:
# sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/asl/*.asl
Note: By doing this you are effectively deleting (potentially useful) logs from your system. If this is your company issued laptop you might want to talk with your IT/Infosec crowd before doing it ;)
Too much environment crap
Also, to avoid the terminal from fetching a bunch of stuff every-time you open a new session (previous login session, motd, system messages, etc), I enabled hushlogin:
# touch ~/.hushlogin
Too much user crap
I also went through my ~/.bash_profile and removed all the stuff that I no longer needed. Don't underestimate the impact that those utilities that show you which git branch you are currently on have in your terminal load time.
SSH connection reuse
If you, like me, spend most of your day accessing a multitude of different hosts using ssh, you might also find useful to enable connection reuse in your ssh config.
To enable connection reuse you need to create a folder where SSH will keep track of established connections:
# mkdir ~/.ssh/tmp
and add the following two lines to the top of your ssh config (~/.ssh/config):
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /Users/USERNAME/.ssh/tmp/%h_%p_%r
I hope these small tricks save you as much time as they have saved me.
