yah, 9600 baud is as fast as I need my terminal to go. 19.2K is just crazy.

From what I remember, and I'm possibly wrong with this, the Matrox Millenium cards were the last generation where 2D performance was a design focus - the Matrox RAMDAC was the best there was at the time. After the Voodoo 3 was released (IIRC the first combined 2D+3D accelerated video card) the 3D arms race started, but 2D performance hasn't moved a lot since then (at least in consumer-level hardware), hence the move to software being written in OpenGL etc. to benefit from hardware 3D acceleration.

I'm guessing that "workstation" cards (designed for CAD etc.) may have moved on a bit since then, though.

On my laptop this terminal is not very fast. A cached 'find /' runs in 11 seconds on an xterm, 17 seconds on maximized alacrity when it's on screen, 25 seconds on alacritty if it's off-screen, and 44 seconds on a 80x24 alacritty.

I don't know why it's slower when you make the window smaller, or when it's not being displayed. I expect the answer is "some kind of OpenGL bullshit" but beyond that...

gnome-terminal takes about 5 minutes to do this, but it has unlimited scrollback and as far as I can see alacritty has no scrollback whatsoever.