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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#111

Post by swiley »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #70
staofbur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the shit is concentrated on a couple of notable platforms: Windows and Android. Outside of that space I've noticed less productivity hampering nightmare tools and OS features. Really I get perhaps one or two bits of stupid from Linux a year on the server-side, usually when integrating it with Windows ironically, and on the macOS/iOS front I haven't had a notable issue since I switched about a year ago…

I'm using Linux for my daily work for more than ten years now and develop for MacOS since around 2000, and I honestly cannot confirm this. If you have a fast and well-tuned machine, the sluggishness of modern applications might not be so notable, but it surely is there, and then there are also many usability issues of desktop software on Linux. Not to speak of browser-based applications, which mostly have unusable us…

The nice thing about GNU/Linux is that the you can almost completely avoid all of the "desktop applications." I only ever start X when I need Firefox or mupdf. Everything else is a nice lightweight TTY app that I run in tmux. My 1.3 GHz celleron netbook is incredibly responsive set up this way.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#112

Post by nneonneo »

titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

These numbers don't seem abnormal; I recall building Safari many years ago, and having multi-GB of intermediate products shrink down to a 30MB executable (plus a few hundred MB of debug symbol).

So, I have a thought: if we're spending all this time to compile functions (particularly template functions) that are just thrown away later, why are we performing all our optimization passes up-front? Surely, optimization passes in a project like Chrome must eat up a lot of compilation cycles, and if that's literally wasted, why do it in the first place? Can we have a prelink step where we figure out which symbols will eventually make it, and feed that backwards into the compiler?

Maybe a more efficient general approach might be to simply have the optimizer be a thing that runs after the linker, so that the front-end compiler just tries to translate C++ into some intermediate representation as fast as possible. The linker can do the LTO thing, then split the output into multiple chunks for parallelization, and finally merge the optimized chunks back together. With LLVM, it feels like the bitcode makes this a possible compilation approach...

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#113

Post by bitwize »

The Amiga prioritized user-input interrupts before all other interrupts, so if there ever was a time you couldn't move the mouse on the Amiga, it meant that the system was well and truly crashed.

30 years on and the peecee industry still doesn't know how to design a fucking system.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#114

Post by gruturo »

hoodoof wrote: post #53

Saw the headline and thought "must be Windows". I'm not a Windows hater, but one of my long standing gripes about Windows is that it just seems to have terrible multitasking compared to OSX. I'm sure there are reasons but it just seems utterly symbolic of Microsoft that they never managed to get Windows to multitask in a rock solid, smooth and reliable way like OSX.

I am absolutely a Windows hater, but I've experienced the same problem in Linux, MacOS, Windows, BSD, you name it.

See for example Con Kolivas' famous rant about how Linux schedulers were ignoring the interactivity requirements of desktop usage, and resulted in a terrible experience with constant tiny freezes.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#115

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

nailer wrote: post #56

While the issue closing processes slowly is unique to Windows 10, I've found similar situations of not being able to control my OS on RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and MacOS. At this point I genuinely believe latency will be the death of general purpose computing. iOS and Android very rarely get out of control. Apple is already pushing iOS devices as laptop replacements. But we lose a lot on these devices with their locked do…

I've seen Android get "out of control" on lower end devices. If you stick with higher end devices and/or first-party the experience is usually very slick. I don't think I've ever had a OnePlus device freeze up or stutter on me, for instance.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#116

Post by vidarh »

oblio wrote: post #78
vidarh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? Yes: Not isolating different modules sufficiently to allow you to avoid including most headers when compiling most modules. Patterns to do this in C++ has been well understood for two decades: Strict separation of concerns coupled with facades at the boundaries that let all the implementation details of the modules remain hidden. Yes, it has a cost: You're incurring extra call overhea…

While what you're saying might be true, I can't help but think about Pascal units and say: "It didn't have to be this hard! We solved this problem 40 years ago!"

Yes there are plenty of other solutions if you use other languages, but I decided to constrain myself to how you'd address it in C++

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#117

Post by bitwize »

paulio wrote: post #57

He's also written some stuff regarding Visual Studio perf. https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/self-inflicted-... Close to my heart as I use Visual Studio all day. Horrid piece of software. I'll probably get downvoted for this.

It's against HN policy to downvote-bait.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#118

Post by ygra »

nneonneo wrote: post #112
titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

These numbers don't seem abnormal; I recall building Safari many years ago, and having multi-GB of intermediate products shrink down to a 30MB executable (plus a few hundred MB of debug symbol). So, I have a thought: if we're spending all this time to compile functions (particularly template functions) that are just thrown away later, why are we performing all our optimization passes up-front? Surely, optimization pa…

Doesn't link-time code generation already exist (at least on MSVC, I think). It makes the linking step so much more expensive, though, which sucks for incremental builds.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#119

Post by vidarh »

lucian1900 wrote: post #93
vidarh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? Yes: Not isolating different modules sufficiently to allow you to avoid including most headers when compiling most modules. Patterns to do this in C++ has been well understood for two decades: Strict separation of concerns coupled with facades at the boundaries that let all the implementation details of the modules remain hidden. Yes, it has a cost: You're incurring extra call overhea…

Unfortunately that's not feasible for highly performance-sensitive projects like browsers or games.

It absolutely is. If most of your time is spent on calls traversing large portions of a code-base that size, then you have a far bigger problem in that you'll be blowing your cache all the time. Fix that problem, and you're halfway there to creating better separated modules that can be encapsulated the way I described.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

#120

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

paulio wrote: post #57

He's also written some stuff regarding Visual Studio perf. https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/self-inflicted-... Close to my heart as I use Visual Studio all day. Horrid piece of software. I'll probably get downvoted for this.

I live in two worlds at the moment - supporting and maintaining a large PHP application (for which I use phpStorm) and developing .NET applications (for which I, obviously, use VS).

I've been a VS user for nigh-on 10 years now and always found the experience really fantastic. I think it's certainly more coherent that the IntelliJ-based IDEs (which, to be fair, are also very good).

Anyway, I'm genuinely surprised to see VS described as "horrid" - what specifically do you dislike about it?

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