I haven't experienced this myself, but I can offer some possible troubleshooting tips :)

See if it happens in xterm as well. If so, it might have something to do with your bashrc or bash_profile (if you're using bash, that is, others have different preference files)

If it doesn't slow down in xterm, try konsole to double check that it's something up with gnome-terminal and/or launch gnome-terminal from xterm, there may be some error statements being flushed to STDIN that may help diagnose it... 

-Chris

On 2011-11-17, at 6:02 AM, Yi Ding wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> First time scientific linux user.  I'm having a strange issue that I
> haven't seen on any other installation.  Basically at random
> intervals, my GNOME Terminal (and/or any other terminals I'm using,
> for example SSH from another machine) slows down to a crawl.  This
> slowness doesn't seem to affect my GUI applications, and when I run
> top, there's no signs of high cpu or memory usage.
> 
> Has anyone else had this problem?  Can someone suggest a solution?
> 
> Thanks,
> Yi