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

24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

randomascii.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 320 posts

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

#141

Post by AJRF »

habosa wrote: 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've gone from Windows -> macOS -> Fedora running i3wm.

Totally agree that Windows is the worst of the bunch and its still a huge problem on macOS.

On Fedora+i3wm, when my desktop opens from the login it is "immediately" ready for input. I've tried to ask some people to compare between macOS and my laptop and they say they don't notice a difference, so I think people are conditioned to waiting with these little unconscious pauses they don't notice.

I wonder is there a way to do accurate and meaningful timings for responsiveness in these situations.

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

#143

Post by CodeWriter23 »

speedplane wrote: post #102
oso2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More cores, more RAM, more cache, more concurrency will help create higher total throughput but usually also mean higher latency because of increased context switching, natural need for more resource locks, increased delay in searching/reading larger stores like cache & RAM, and, higher latency penalties when there are cache misses and/or applications that require write-through policies. Things like faster clocks (wh…

All the concerns in your comment are real, but they can be boiled down to one simple fact: Moore's law is dead. Our processors are now not advancing nearly as quickly as people can create solutions for them. Case in point - Virtual Reality, which has technically been on the market for years, but out of reach for most users. If processors are not improving, everything else slows down. Graphics, games, and the internet…

If we had an operating system where every system call used an async calling interface, the type of spinlock latency observed in this article would be greatly reduced. It wouldn’t bring Moore’s Law back but it would make the most of what CPU resource we have.

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

#144

Post by exikyut »

cordite wrote: post #100
bartread wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't meant to be an especially religious comment, but I regularly switch back and forth between OSX and Windows 10 and wanted to make mention of the differences. I also use Ubuntu fairly regularly but only over ssh so I'll discount it from this comparison. Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Window…

OSX capturing and buffering the password input on the login overlay is definitely nice, compared to windows 10 dropping inputs until it is ‘ready’ for the last 2 characters of my password.

Thanks to PAM on Linux, " login: " is printed by an entirely different set of processes than the "Password: " that follows it.

At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...

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

#145

Post by lukeh »

mort96 wrote: post #137
peterept wrote: post #115

Have to give it to Apple for acknowledging the difficulty in writing responsive (as in no lockups) applications and designing multiple developer framework solutions to solve it (Grand Central Dispatch and NSOperationQueue). Both those are designed to enable developers to easily offload work to background threads and prioritise queued work for the user. No open-for-interpretation thread priorities, but named QoS prior…

Maybe more developers would make use of it if it was open source, existed for other platforms, and available for languages people actually use on those other platforms.

GCD is. NSOperationQueue is too tightly coupled to Foundation to be useful/relevant on other platforms.

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

#146

Post by herewulf »

jcelerier wrote: post #121
goombastic wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strange. I run a 6 year old PC with win 10 on it. It has 4GB of RAM. I use an SSD and an M.2 drive. The thing is snappy as hell. I face zero lags, jitters, or switching delays at all. I get the feeling that writing things to disk is causing delays.

I had a friend telling me "check out my new computer it's so snappy!" once and the darn thing was so slow it made my hands shake from the stress. Can't believe anyone on the internet telling they don't have any lag.

Every time we get snappier hardware, we just add more software bloat. I pretty much run two kinds of GUI apps (on Linux with a lightweight, tiling window manager): web browsers and terminals. My terminal apps are always very snappy, the web browsers not so much. I'm of the opinion that the computer should wait for me, not the other way around. Doesn't seem to work out that way with "modern UIs".

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

#147

Post by lazyjones »

Animats wrote: post #135

So why are we in this mess? Because there are still buffer overflows. Address space randomization is done because buffer overflows allow exploits. But rather than fixing the underlying problem, we now have complex schemes to spread programs over the entire 64 bit address space to make such exploits unreliable. Then, apparently Microsoft's Javascript JIT engine has enough problems with buffer overflows that each compi…

Isn‘t that a bit ignorant when nobody is forced to access their e-mail through a website running JIT-compiled JS in a browser with built-in OS features on a bloated, graphical UI of an OS with the burden of 25+ years of backwards compatibility?

A fast client running on a lean OS would not exhibit these problems - and AFAIK gmail still supports IMAP.

(I use Fastmail on MacOS&IOS/Safari and have no such issues either).

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

#148

Post by AceJohnny2 »

Animats wrote: post #135

So why are we in this mess? Because there are still buffer overflows. Address space randomization is done because buffer overflows allow exploits. But rather than fixing the underlying problem, we now have complex schemes to spread programs over the entire 64 bit address space to make such exploits unreliable. Then, apparently Microsoft's Javascript JIT engine has enough problems with buffer overflows that each compi…

> Microsoft's Javascript JIT engine

This is Google's. The problem manifested in Chrome. From the article:

> It turns out that v8 (Chrome’s JavaScript engine) has CodeRange objects for managing code-gen [...] But what if you have multiple CodeRange objects, and what if those get allocated at random addresses and then freed?

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

#149

Post by ibrahim81 »

ax0ar wrote: post #22
scrollaway wrote: post #10

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..

Downvotes here are pathetic: "somebody made a mistake on the internet, let's show him how much of an idiot he is!"

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

#150

Post by exikyut »

speedplane wrote: post #102
oso2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More cores, more RAM, more cache, more concurrency will help create higher total throughput but usually also mean higher latency because of increased context switching, natural need for more resource locks, increased delay in searching/reading larger stores like cache & RAM, and, higher latency penalties when there are cache misses and/or applications that require write-through policies. Things like faster clocks (wh…

All the concerns in your comment are real, but they can be boiled down to one simple fact: Moore's law is dead. Our processors are now not advancing nearly as quickly as people can create solutions for them. Case in point - Virtual Reality, which has technically been on the market for years, but out of reach for most users. If processors are not improving, everything else slows down. Graphics, games, and the internet…

The internet, sure. But GPUs will figure out new ways to parallelize, which is not dead yet.
Post reply on HN