471–480 of 509 posts
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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...
This actually annoys me badly. One of the problems I see regularly is applications that fail to log enough of the stack to see what the entry point of the thing that actually went wrong is because the syslog packet size is set to 512 bytes. The problem is clearly syslog then, not the 12KiB of stack your app throws when something goes pop!?!?
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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.
Expect Firefox to demand a potent GPU just to load soon enough, thanks to GTK3...
None of this even matters because Firefox isn't a traditional application and renders most thing itself using Skia.
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…
Basically, the GPU card vendors could hook any part of the win32 GDI pre windows vista, and they did. Post vista, only a tiny portion of the GDI is accelerated. In theory you can avoid this by writing your application using a more modern API, but the vast majority of native windows applications continue to basically be GDI based due to age, or various GUI toolkits still being GDI based. Worse there are a number of toolkits (or browsers) which implement their own drawing routines rather than calling the system supplied ones.
The final composited results with aero are of course accelerated, but that only really tends to add additional latency. Switching to one of the basic themes makes win7 noticeably more responsive, but also tends to tear a lot. I've got an incredibly high end desktop machine, carefully tweaked/optimized and I can frequently see it the ~1/10 of a second lags while windows update after being maximized/etc. Compared to the 10 year old pretty high end XP machine (with upgraded SSD/etc, and also carefully tuned) it doesn't seem to be faster on basic desktop type operations. Fire up a recent game, or doing builds its massively faster but running word/firefox/whatever the old machine "feels" faster.
(tuned, as in I have a dozen or so, tweaks I've been collecting/researching for the past decade+, on ways to make the machine feel more responsive, it all started with MenuShow delay in win95, and has grown from there and now includes all the usual stuff plus tweaking power profiles, and a bunch of less obvious "feel" things like high DPI mice with fast base speeds).
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I have just bought a Windows 10 laptop for my wife. I don't know if it is random updates or junkware or whatever, but sometimes the system will lock out for minutes - task manager shows <50% of load on any of disk, ram and cpu, but even waiting for task manager to launch can take a minute! I've witnessed a simple program (FAR manager) taking a minute to show its UI!
Try turning off all of the malware and search features. Windows defender will run on every file, folder, or executable you touch. Play a movie with VLC? Here let us scan VLC, every DLL it depends on, every file you have opened with it, and the entire file you are about to open. They also bundled Cortana and Bing with search, which means you can get ads in your search! But also means it makes like twenty web queries e…
I hope MS does something about this immediately. It's maddening.
This is great work. I hope MS can improve Windows 10 by fixing this. I just added a new Win10 laptop with much better specs than my 3 year old rMBP, and I'm shocked by how much apparently random latency I experience with the UI in Windows 10 compared to the Mac. That's not to mention the issues of sloppier track pad (which constantly detects my left hand while I type) or the ungodly slow unzip (via 7z). If only Apple…
I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide, but I take your point otherwise. A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination. The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though…
The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though so decompressing tonnes of small files in general will take longer than on OS X or Linux.
In the past windows seemed to be more aggressive about flushing things to disk, and applications were far more generous with calls to FlushFileBuffers() on windows than similar apps on linux were about calling fsync(). Seemingly because fsync() is a machine deathblow on linux when under IO load. Where as windows did a slightly better job of only flushing the requested file. Also, i've seen a number of "streaming" apps on windows play nice and use FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH.. which makes them run slower, but doesn't trash the whole system.
Bottom line is that I wouldn't call NTFS cruddy, it does a lot of things that still aren't mainstream in linux filesystems. If your seeing some huge performance anomaly between windows & linux look closer. NTFS may not be sexy, but its a solid piece of engineering (ok some things are cool like VSS. TxF is also cool but might get deprecated because no one knows about it).
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Try turning off all of the malware and search features. Windows defender will run on every file, folder, or executable you touch. Play a movie with VLC? Here let us scan VLC, every DLL it depends on, every file you have opened with it, and the entire file you are about to open. They also bundled Cortana and Bing with search, which means you can get ads in your search! But also means it makes like twenty web queries e…
Windows defender is by far the "best" malware software when it comes to having a light footprint. Scanning every byte of IO for malware signatures, and the ton of other heavyweight operations are a sure way to eat a ton of processing power. I have a under powered win10 tablet, and I have to remind myself to "disable" windows defender every time it goes to install an update. Otherwise what should be a 2-3 minute opera…
Why is everyone talking about how C++ compilation is slow or something instead of talking about the real problem, which is that GDI is doing resource cleanup on process exit, under lock, for console-mode processes that have probably never used any GDI resources?
mxatone mentions that "Win32k locking design is just bad" in https://twitter.com/mxatone/status/884436870955913216
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…
There are a million responses to your comment, but unless I missed something, no one seems to be redirecting you back to the actual problem at hand and are recommending all sorts of generic ways to reduce the time required to compile a large C++ project... but the issue here was not the generic one: the entire thing that made this article interesting is that his CPU was not being used at all, so this has nothing to d…
However I suspect that as soon as that lock regression in Windows is fixed, that monster CPU load is coming back home to roost, and the workstation is going to be just as dead as my 64 core Linux workstation has been when I've actually '-j 500' without gomacc up and running correctly.
So, by all means, Microsoft should fix this lock regression.
But there's this...elephant...in...this room here.