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I am using a iMac G5 PowerPC which is equipped with 512 MB of RAM. I am using this for Designing purpose where I use lots of graphic software. The most frequent one is Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I had noticed that when I run the terminal and scroll down it works very slow. Some time the system gets slowed that may be due to applications I used, but that must not effect the terminal. How to speed up the system.
It might be possible that there may be too much system logs generated in your system. Due to that your terminal had slowed down a bit. You can first try to clear the logs out of it. That can make it a bit faster. For that use the command - $ cd /private/var/log/asl & $ sudo rm -f *. Run the command and then check back. I will advice you to better upgrade your memory.
That means that some applications in your system is eating up too much of RAM. It can also be possible that the terminal in your system is not fully loaded due to slow performance. You can try to first remove some applications. That is the only way to fix it up. The second option here for you can be upgrading your memory to 2GB something.
It's clear that with only 512 MB of RAM, it is short to run OS X and several apps, even recovering from virtual memory, which slows your iMac. So an extra strip of 512 would be beneficial. In addition to that you can use software for maintenance like Onyx or ToolsX. Do not forget to repair permissions before and after any installation.
I have a similar issue where I am not able to download files properly. I am using a download manager which offers me torrent like features to upload and download files. As the system become slow the downloading time also increased to an extent. After reading out on some article I found that It may be due to port blocking. But my security is set to minimal.
I had tried several settings for my system to make it faster. But nothing works here. It is quite painful because the operation is quite long. I started Onyx with auto repair settings. It took a long time and then I rebooted my Mac forcefully. I have any now re-install this full operating system back again to make it much faster. I had almost all application which I was using.
In my guess the applications in your system might be consuming a much amount of memory. When you start the terminal let it run for some time and if it is slow you can kill the process. Re-launching the same will make it work much faster. You have to on the same hand need to run Activity Monitor so make sure that which service is running in the background and choking up system resource.