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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#51

Side note... not related to the same root cause, but related to a similar end user problem... I've been staying in a lot of hotels lately and using a lot of very slow internet connections (not by choice, that's just what is available) and I wish Chrome had some sort of "low bandwidth" mode where it would only allow requests from your current tab, or maybe current window (easily open a new window to control which tabs…

I was visiting the US for a conference recently (not defcon) and I bought a T-mobile tourist sim, great idea, cost me less than 1/3rd of what my normal sim would have cost; however they had a data cap at 2Gb before they aggressively throttled you.

I was very conservative in my use (thank you hacker news for being data-light) but managed to reach the cap near the end of my stay; my girlfriend who has no concept of what is heavy and what isn’t reached the cap in less than 2 days - after which; mobile data was effectively useless for her.

I can’t imagine what life is like for those who /live/ on data caps- I feel like most web developers don’t give a shit about how much resources they use, not just in terms of CPU/Memory (“lol, it’s 2018 buy a better pc!”) but also in terms of bandwidth; which is regularly out of user control.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#53
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hate ads, and you hate the state of the internet, run adblock. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Seriously. Adblock is the way you have to fight back, to change the economics of the internet. Install it, use it indiscriminately, and make sure you tell others to use it. My company makes a decent chunk of money from ads btw. Not because we can't make money another, better and cleane…

That's not an option for mobile though..

You can install a system-wide adblocker if you have a Samsung phone.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#55

Side note... not related to the same root cause, but related to a similar end user problem... I've been staying in a lot of hotels lately and using a lot of very slow internet connections (not by choice, that's just what is available) and I wish Chrome had some sort of "low bandwidth" mode where it would only allow requests from your current tab, or maybe current window (easily open a new window to control which tabs…

Ironically, I think people on slow connections were early pioneers of using tabs for asynchronous/background page loading.

I don't remember where I learned the technique first, but when I was roaming the world and getting work done via GPRS internet, I'd open links in a new tab and let them slowly load in the background. I'd view the tab later and see the fully rendered content. It would absolutely kill this use case if the tabs would not perform their necessary AJAX calls until foregrounded.

For those not familiar with GPRS of those times, imagine a 9600-14.4 modem speed but with the latency of a satellite connection, so with almost any activity you start seeing 1 second ping times. Even when on ridiculously fast connections, I still retain the muscle memory which causes me to browse in breadth-first mode, opening articles and discussions into tabs in one sweep and then working through the tab list from left to right and closing each as I go.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#56
post #46

I just kind of figured we'd stop having UI lag by now. I work on a 24 core workstation with 64GB of RAM and things lag all the time. Not slow to complete, like jittery key entry and non-responses. Haven't we figured out thread prioritization by now? Can't we make sure something draws 60 times per second while things are going on in the background? My Android Studio build should be totally isolated from my inbox. I kn…

I have a similar workstation (though 12 core I think) and recently I've thought about just running entirely separate VMs, each with dedicated cores and RAM. I'm sick of random slowdowns like you mentioned.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#57

“I work on Chrome, on Windows” ... chrome_child.dll (stack base) KernelBase.dll!VirtualAlloc ntoskrnl.exe!MiCommitVadCfgBits ntoskrnl.exe!MiPopulateCfgBitMap ntoskrnl.exe!ExAcquirePushLockExclusiveEx ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForSingleObject (stack leaf) So don’t use a proprietary kernel that performs poorly?

I'm confused about your suggestion. I work on the Chrome web browser on the Windows platform. If we want to allocate memory we, ultimately, need to call VirtualAlloc. I could work on Chrome for Linux, but then this bug on Windows might never get found or fixed. I am satisfied with my choices, despite the occasional glitches.

They failed to distinguish between

"I use the Chrome browser on Windows to get work done"

and

"I work at Google, making Chrome for Windows".

Human languages, what are you going to do?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#58
post #29

> This is because Windows locks are, by design, not fair Get better OS; problem solved.

What OS do you have in mind? Apparently OSX locks are fair, but the downside is that this may reduce throughput. Linux locks? I have no idea and would be interested to know. I suspect that occasionally fair locks would be ideal, but I don't know if they can be implemented efficiently.

pthreads don't guarantee fairness. futexes, the underlying locking primitive on Linux and the driver of the glibc implementation, don't either.

Futexes do support priority inheritance, so you can use process priority safely. You might drop priority after releasing a lock to ensure some other thread gets a go, and as long as you control the priority of the other contenders, that can work well.

Basics of futexes are here, but nothing about PI or fairness: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/basics-of-futexes/

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#59
post #46

I just kind of figured we'd stop having UI lag by now. I work on a 24 core workstation with 64GB of RAM and things lag all the time. Not slow to complete, like jittery key entry and non-responses. Haven't we figured out thread prioritization by now? Can't we make sure something draws 60 times per second while things are going on in the background? My Android Studio build should be totally isolated from my inbox. I kn…

I'll go into more details in part two, but part of the problem would have reliably disappeared if I had been running a single-core CPU.

Locks are hard.

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