Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a more power-efficient browser

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 105 posts

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#91

Post by amenod »

grawlinson wrote: post #83
RachelF wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...

If I don't use a specific PC for around a week, it's basically unusable on startup. CPU/HDD are at 100% for around 20 minutes, then every now and then they spike again. I dunno what the hell Microsoft are playing at, but I'm in the process of switching all my computers to Linux.

Well, that's one thing you can be sure will never happen with Linux/*BSD. If some service bothers you, you can always reschedule it or turn it off. Good like with "phone home" updates in Windows 10! (unless you are an enterprise user, and even then...)

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#92

Post by mtgx »

kylealden wrote: post #48
mtgx wrote: post #8

I wish they didn't do these tests on a Microsoft-made Surface Book...They should've taken a couple of other popular Windows 10 notebooks and maybe do the tests on those. Who knows how much of this difference is because of Edge itself (which is how well it would work on other notebooks, too), and how much it's the optimization they did for Edge for their own hardware.

We chose the Surface Book because it's instrumented with a chip that allows direct measurement of instantaneous power consumption, which most OEM devices don't have, and because it has lots of battery for a fun run-down video :)

Sure, but am I supposed to believe that Edge doesn't get special optimizations on the Surface Book compared to on other devices?

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#93

Post by bsilvereagle »

RachelF wrote: post #73
Yhippa wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously why on Earth does this happen? Even if Edge ends up being more power-efficient the rest of the OS (Windows 10) is going to ensure that I will get no more than 3 hours of battery life on my laptop.

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...

The only solution to this I've found is to disable Windows Update from searching for updates by setting it to "Manual Updates Only".

However, this causes a problem in that every time you want to actually update, Windows Update may rebuild the entire "installed updates" database from scratch which can take hours on a heavily patched machine.

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#94

Post by martinml »

ams6110 wrote: post #57

Honestly I'd be happy if they could stop Windows 10 from turning my laptop into a hair dryer randomly while it is otherwise entirely idle. The thing is sitting there doing nothing, suddenly the fan will start roaring and the CPU utilization spikes.

Apparently Windows 10 likes to use idle time to test the memory:

http://superuser.com/questions/635837/high-cpu-load-from-sys...

In my desktop it was causing it to rev up the fan when it was idle for a few minutes.

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#95

Post by executesorder66 »

executesorder66 wrote: post #87
ams6110 wrote: post #57

Honestly I'd be happy if they could stop Windows 10 from turning my laptop into a hair dryer randomly while it is otherwise entirely idle. The thing is sitting there doing nothing, suddenly the fan will start roaring and the CPU utilization spikes.

> The thing is sitting there doing nothing Doing nothing, except mabye mining a fuckton of data about you and sending it to Microsoft.

To all the downvoters, please check this link: http://cmdrkeene.com/psa-windows-10-high-cpu-usage

And take note of point 1 and 2.

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#96

Post by acqq »

RachelF wrote: post #73
Yhippa wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously why on Earth does this happen? Even if Edge ends up being more power-efficient the rest of the OS (Windows 10) is going to ensure that I will get no more than 3 hours of battery life on my laptop.

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...

It's a poorly programmed code of the Update subsystem, and I've located the problematic function spending all of the CPU time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267019

     wuaueng.dll!CUpdatesToPruneList::AddSupersedenceInfoIfNeeded
The bug is obviously in highly inefficient traversal through the existing info about the updates, which didn't degrade to being so obviously bad at the time when there was just a small number of the updates.

I've used Microsoft tools to diagnose that, and I'm not the only one who has found it,

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30535980-WIN7-MS-updates-ta...

so the same info is available to Microsoft, but they obviously don't want to fix it.

On my machine it takes some 4 hours using 100% CPU of one core. If there are only 100 millions of such machines, and if it's just 40 Watt hours used during these 4 hours, it gives some 4 Gigawatt hours wasted every month in the world due to that particular bad code (If I calculated it right, over one year, it's a rough equivalent of the total energy use of 1500 Germans or 500 US citizens.)

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#97

Post by acqq »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #93
RachelF wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...

The only solution to this I've found is to disable Windows Update from searching for updates by setting it to "Manual Updates Only". However, this causes a problem in that every time you want to actually update, Windows Update may rebuild the entire "installed updates" database from scratch which can take hours on a heavily patched machine.

It's not related to the rebuilding or not rebuilding the "SoftwareDistribution" database (I've tried that) once the new updates exist, the traversal part is always slow, at least on Windows 7.

(The database is, fascinatingly, the whole 1 GB big).

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#99

Post by j45 »

ygra wrote: post #88
j45 wrote: post #81

Why was Safari excluded? It's an interesting data point in the power-efficiency topic.

Doesn't run on Windows. So you'd change more than the browser running on otherwise exactly the same machine, making a comparison difficult.

Could just as easily run windows natively on a mac for comparison on the same hardware.

Also might be able to do a battery size to hours of browser use comparison.

Or, comparing Microsoft with their hardware (Surface Pro's are great) vs a Mac laptop.

At the end of the day, time in a browser.... is time in a browser to the end user.

Re: Building a more power-efficient browser

#100

Post by heisenbit »

personjerry wrote: post #5

But how does it compare to Safari on Apple computers? AFAIK Safari is extremely power efficient.

There has been a lot of similar work on iOS. Check out the WWDC videos at developer.apple.com a year or more likely two back. It is quite amazing what can be done by schedulers and proper use of resources. I guess these optimizations have also found their way back into macOS and Safari on the laptop platform. Considering the release frequency who knows for sure but at least Apple claims their broswer is very efficient.

It is worth noting that some of the changes go really deep in the architecture and are not easy to pull off. I think lack of system level focus on low battery and the need to do deep changes in the OS are the reasons for the considerable lateness of Microsoft on this front.

Post reply on HN