Yeah. I've had issues on OS X in the past, since its Terminal is anything but optimized. I have occasionally had issues with extremely verbose programs where the lion's share of execution time was actually spent displaying output in the terminal. Piping output to a file instead made execution lightning fast. This surprised me at the time because I figured it would be buffered and each process would run on its own CPU core.

Not sure I've ever had this problem on Linux though.