I really don't perceive any change in rendering speed on my terminal with different kinds of fonts (my notebook has an Intel Celeron at 2 GHz, so I should notice a change if there were any). I've even tried with sans and serif fonts (non-monospace) and using hinting but I don't notice any increase or decrease on performance of regular, non-intensive use at all. Maybe it has something to do with the x drivers of your machine. By the way I'm on Fedora 20, 64 bits.
However, I conducted a little experiment with some different fonts: terminus, dejavu mono (which is the same as monospace), liberation mono and open sans. On two different terminal emulators and with different hinting configurations:
- Gnome Terminal, 1 million lines, 8192 lines buffer:
- Full font hinting:
- terminus 9
- Startup time:
0.348
- Execution time:
16.137
- monospace 9
- Startup time:
0.344
- Execution time:
16.199
- liberation mono 9
- Startup time:
0.357
- Execution time:
16.120
- open sans 9
- Startup time:
0.342
- Execution time:
16.261
- Font hinting disabled:
- terminus 9
- Startup time:
0.351
- Execution time:
16.134
- monospace 9
- Startup time:
0.336
- Execution time:
16.095
- liberation mono 9
- Startup time:
0.349
- Execution time:
16.391
- open sans 9
- Startup time:
0.352
- Execution time:
16.157
- XFCE4 Terminal, 1 million lines, 8192 lines buffer:
- Full font hinting:
- terminus 9
- Startup time:
0.064
- Execution time:
16.127
- monospace 9
- Startup time:
0.062
- Execution time:
16.104
All the times were measured using the time command and taken only the real value, the command was run 10 times for each different font configuration and the value displayed here is the mean of each batch of measures, a new terminal was used for every execution.
As you can see there's not any noticeable difference between the different fonts and even with or without hinting, however, the only thing that jumps into sight is the difference of the startup times between the gnome-terminal and the xfce4-terminal, where gnome is ~554% slower than xfce, but in normal circumstances this is negligible.
