UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hello,

I am doing fluid simulations using OpenFOAM. This program produces a lot of output every time step.
Producing output is surely not the most time consuming part, but I wonder whether writing output to the terminal or writing it into a file is faster.

With thousands of time steps a little improvement may result in a noticeable cut in runtime.

Does anyone have experience with this?

There is some overhead to displaying the terminal contents, yes. How much overhead, depends on the kind of terminal.

local rawtext console -- Blazing fast. Not much to be gained.
xterm/etc -- medium. You may notice some improvements from redirecting the output.
Framebuffer console -- Dog-slow. Every newline is a huge video block-copy operation. They're almost slow enough to watch. You may get startling improvements from reducing output.