When I do large compilations (anywhere, but my question assumes Linux), many messages are often output to the screen. My question is, do these messages slow down the process? And if they do, does switching to a different tty so they aren't displayed to the screen reduce the performance hit?
SnapOverflow
Yes, they certainly can.
From http://www.linuxakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php
Run yes in an xterm, and you will see a lot of "y" lines swooshing past your eyes. Naturally, the yes process is able to generate "y" lines much faster than the xterm application is able to parse them, update its frame buffer, communicate with the X server in order to scroll the window and so on. How is it possible for these programs to cooperate?
The answer lies in blocking I/O. The pseudo terminal can only keep a certain amount of data inside its kernel buffer, and when that buffer is full and yes tries to call write(2), then write(2) will block, moving the yes process into the interruptible sleep state where it remains until the xterm process has had a chance to read off some of the buffered bytes.
The same thing happens if the TTY is connected to a serial port. yes would be able to transmit data at a much higher rate than, say, 9600 baud, but if the serial port is limited to that speed, the kernel buffer soon fills up and any subsequent write(2) calls block the process (or fail with the error code EAGAIN if the process has requested non-blocking I/O).
The way to speed up your compile if you are afraid of this is: