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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

#431

Post by astrodust »

martyvis wrote: post #217

For my own amusement, when ever I get a new OS build on my machine, I'd open up a task manager and watch CPU load just by wiggling the mouse a lot or maybe simply pressing page up and down. I'm pretty sure it's always pretty easy to generate 25% CPU doing very little. Another thing would be just opening a local file from within a running application and wondering why multiple seconds and hence billions of CPU cycles…

macOS has always had really smooth window wiggling because each window is a separate layer rendered on the GPU. Windows has had problems in the past because wiggling windows causes repaints in the background ones, they had no such buffer, but Windows Aero uses a model a lot like the macOS one.

What OS are you running?

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

#432

Post by mplewis »

mamcx wrote: post #408
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…

> Damn, are we doing this wrong? SUPER-wrong. With all the time-loss, money-loss, opportunity-loss, C/C++/Js must have been rule out as the worst tools for our job decades ago, by ANY RATIONAL ENGINER. And instead of band-aid them, the sane path is to freeze them and only apply critical patch and use something else. And other options are already know, have been proved and could have be a better foundation, except bec…

And why should any other programming language be better?

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

#433

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

taw55 wrote: post #147
jonathanstrange wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck on improving the situation as long as you have people running around who consider this all fine and normal. https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-f...

Idiomatic Java is idiotic.

Most of the hate for Java that I see is really hate for the idioms. The nice things about idioms is that you don't have to follow them. But for whatever reason, Java devs stick to them. And that's how you get monstrosities like that stack trace and Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition.

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

#435

Post by mark-r »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
anigbrowl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? What good is an operating system on a multi-core device that allows anything to get that close to the performance envelope? This is a fine example of competition driving change for change's sake rather than real innovation and everything ending up worse as a result. I like new features as much as the next person, but not when they compromise core functionality. Not being able to type is inexcusable .

I agree. However at this point, I don't see anything an OS can do to help. I see plenty of typing slowdowns every other day now. But I'm not sure just how many of them are the OS's fault. When your typing seems to lag, there are two places that can be slowing it down - the input side (reacting to hardware events) and the output side (drawing and updating the UI). I suppose keyboard buffers are pretty well isolated, a…

It's hard to believe the OS couldn't help when Windows 10 has the problem but Windows 7 doesn't.

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

#436

Post by Narishma »

zlynx wrote: post #371
martyvis wrote: post #217

For my own amusement, when ever I get a new OS build on my machine, I'd open up a task manager and watch CPU load just by wiggling the mouse a lot or maybe simply pressing page up and down. I'm pretty sure it's always pretty easy to generate 25% CPU doing very little. Another thing would be just opening a local file from within a running application and wondering why multiple seconds and hence billions of CPU cycles…

That used to be true back when the CPU did all of the GUI rendering. But now most all of it is offloaded to the GPU. Any GPU that can render Quake 3 Arena at 120 FPS (and that's ALL of them even Intel IGPs) can wiggle a window around very easily. Not sure about file opens. Simple applications like GVIM don't seem to have seconds of delay for me, but I know what you mean with things like spreadsheet or word processor…

He said wiggling the mouse, not a window.

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

#437

Post by floatboth »

anigbrowl wrote: post #42
weinzierl wrote: post #16

I grew up on the Commodore 64 (1 Core, 1 hyper-thread :-), almost 1 MHz clock freq, almost 64 K usable RAM). The machine was usually pretty responsive, but when I typed too quickly in my word processor it sometimes got stuck and ate a few characters. I used to think: "If computers were only fast enough so I could type without interruption...". If you'd asked me back then for a top ten list what I wished computers cou…

I have almost the same background (Vic-20, if you thought programming was hard try having only 3.5k of RAM) and feel the same irritation...but I don't wonder why computers aren't faster, I wonder why operating systems and application is so utterly shit. I have a Moto X phone (not too old) and watching it slow down is almost comical. Sometimes I'll decide to close a few apps and hitting the selector button brings up s…

You don't have to wait for the X. Just swipe them away.

Or just don't close activities ever, it's pretty pointless. It doesn't actually kill the app if it's still open.

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

#438

Post by E6300 »

bonzini wrote: post #110
rurban wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just use zapcc, and compile-time will be down. it's basically clang-4.0 so it's safe to use.

If it's basically clang 4.0, why is it not part of clang? Projects like zapcc remind me of why the GPL is a good thing. (I predict that in 10 years all the various soft cores will be variants of RISC-V each with its own old, unmaintained and proprietary fork of LLVM).

If the times claimed by the developers are true, then it just tells me that BSD was the correct choice of license, as otherwise zapcc might not have happened. A world with a lot of high quality software, some of it open source and some of it closed source, is better than that same world minus the closed source.

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

#439

Post by floatboth »

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…

> 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour

Not bad. FreeBSD takes about the same, and it's plain C… oh wait, no, a large part of the compile time is LLVM/clang which is… not C.

Though there is now a clever incremental sort of thing called meta mode https://www.bsdcan.org/2014/schedule/attachments/267_freebsd...

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

#440

Post by anigbrowl »

simias wrote: post #92
anigbrowl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? What good is an operating system on a multi-core device that allows anything to get that close to the performance envelope? This is a fine example of competition driving change for change's sake rather than real innovation and everything ending up worse as a result. I like new features as much as the next person, but not when they compromise core functionality. Not being able to type is inexcusable .

You have alternatives though. I've been using basically the same linux environment for about a decade now. I don't have a proper desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, just Xorg and StumpWM as a window manager. Then I have Firefox, Emacs and urxvt running tmux. I use a handful of GTK applications when the need arises like Gimp, Inkscape, Evince and maybe a couple others. Done. It boots up in a few seconds from a SSD,…

Yeah I have a Linux environment on a keychain USB device that I now use often enough to think seriously about abandoning Windows (though I don't hate Win as such, but kept using it because of some applications I relied upon).

Linux has (sometimes) had sort of the opposite problem, insufficient innovation in user interface design. I'm looking forward to Gnome 3 now; I felt that when CSS took over the web a lot of UI innovation moved to the server end and stalled at the client (think the really long hiatus in the development of Enlightenment, which was at one time the cutting edge of UI design/customizability while still being fast and responsive).

If you want ideas for where Linux capabilities should b going, please go check out Flowstone, which I think is criminally under-appreciated. The current version uses Ruby, but previous incarnations allowed you deploy code in C or assembler(!) within the visual programming environment. It's doin' me a heckin' confuse that this isn't a standard development environment option for everything from shell scripts to large-scale applications. Once you go to flow-based programming text-only IDEs look masochistic and pointless, and text-only is a terrible way to teach programming to people because discovery and syntax are inaccessible and really better done by computers. I like NoFlo for js development but the Linux desktop is crying out to be brought into a flow-based paradigm.

Sorry about going a bit off-topic but when I see exhortations to go with extremely simple solutions like StumpWM I have the opposite-but-similar reaction to the OP: why am I running some beast of a computer (at least by historical standards) so I can have a 20 year old user interface? Surely there is some middle ground between cancerous levels of abstraction/feature creep and monk-like asceticism.

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