Terminal.app is very important to me as I use a lot of console based programs, so it’s very annoying if I have to wait a few seconds for it to start up. Recently, I stumbled across a helpful blog post (Speed Up a Slow Terminal by Clearing Log Files) that explains an easy way of combatting the slow startup of Terminal.app. I decided to take this a bit further and added to root’s crontab (using the command sudo crontab -e) the following line
@hourly rm -f /private/var/log/asl/*.asl
This cleans up the mysterious .asl log files Terminal.app produces and everything has been fine so far.