Low performance and high load in gnome-terminal

Issue

• When using gnome-terminal and executing a cat of a large text file (>1Mb) the cpu gets a very high load and it takes very long before the cat job is finished.
• If I cat a text file of size 1MB in a Solaris x-terminal it takes 0.02 seconds. On a terminal in RHEL it takes 10 seconds.
• While viewing the file with cat, X-server CPU usage is going to 100%.
• A compiled version of mrxvt is not affected and shows the same performance as on solaris.