24-core CPU and I can’t type an email • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by baq » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

rothron wrote: post #140

yason wrote: post #35

Interesting story in particular, but in general, performance and memory behave like any other resource that is plentiful: they get used up until things are slowish again. Like road space. Things get added on top of each other until the reduction in speed becomes visible. Because these days, unlike in the 90's, it's no help waiting for the next Pentium processor to come out this usually results in a heavy optimisation…

The move from CRT to LCD adds a few milliseconds depending on the screen. We're so used do it by now, that typing on old hardware is almost jarring. It feels almost TOO responsive.

i've got a 144hz lcd display. it's amazing. i feel almost like in the good old days.

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

#162

Post by antt » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:06 AM UTC

some_account wrote: post #154

I'm running Manjaro Linux with Deepin Desktop on a Dual core 0.9Ghz CPU with 8 GB of memory. Boot speed from off to login is less than 5 seconds. From hibernate it's instant. My girlfriend brought similar desktop to work and people with windows couldn't believe the machine was that fast. It runs circles around their new windows laptops with tons of memory and cpu cores. Firefox loads in a second. Kingsoft office also…

I run Debian Unstable/Testing, at 2000+ tabs on Firefox and three weeks up time the used memory is 3.21G/15.4G.

The year of the Linux desktop was some time in the 00's, just that few people noticed.

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

#163

Post by johnchristopher » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #144

cordite wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Ah! So that's what's going on :D.

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

#164

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

sadamznintern wrote: post #156

some_account wrote: post #154

I'm running Manjaro Linux with Deepin Desktop on a Dual core 0.9Ghz CPU with 8 GB of memory. Boot speed from off to login is less than 5 seconds. From hibernate it's instant. My girlfriend brought similar desktop to work and people with windows couldn't believe the machine was that fast. It runs circles around their new windows laptops with tons of memory and cpu cores. Firefox loads in a second. Kingsoft office also…

.9ghz in 2018!? What machine is this?

Intel Core-M?

A SoC-like, high performance, low power mobile CPU. Performance per MHz ratio is high, allows reasonable performance with low clock frequency.

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

#165

Post by oblio » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

ndh2 wrote: post #133

jadavies wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: "I work on Chrome, on Windows, focused on performance. Investigating this hang was actually my job."

So? The two bugs uncovered were Windows bugs.

The user doesn't care. Chrome is slow, he won't switch OS just because of that.

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

#166

Post by tralarpa » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:08 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #147

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).

Web applications are the best example for Wirth's law. It's really mind-boggling if you think about it. None of the client-side components of a web application were originally designed for what they are used for today:

1. a programming language (Javascript) that turns into a nightmare if you try to write programs with more than a few thousand lines

2. a user interface that requires you to learn two additional declarative languages (HTML and CSS), both of them equally incomplete and crappy.

3. an API between 1 and 2 that is so lacking that you need an external library (e.g. jQuery) to reduce the amount of boilerplate code to a sane level.

4. a network protocol (HTTP) that was designed for static web pages with a few pictures and that has serious performance issues for anything more complex.

5. and finally, the whole thing implemented in a language (C or C++) that is fast but offers you plenty of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot in obscur ways security-wise.

Things are changing fortunately (HTTP/2, QUIC, Rust).

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

#167

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:09 AM UTC

It seems many comments missed the point. The article is not about how bloated modern software is, how many useless features and programs are wasting CPU cycles for pointless jobs, etc. (Yes, modern software is bloated, for this reason, I'm using the MATE desktop on a minimum Gentoo installation, but this is not what the article is about.)

It is describing how web browser, a piece of software with extremely high inherent complexity, interacts with the memory allocator of the operating system, another piece of software with high inherent complexity, combined with a rarely used feature from Gmail, can trigger complex and complicated interactions and cause major problems due to hidden bugs in various places. This type of apparent "simple" lockup requires "the most qualified people to diagnose".

These problematic interactions are unavoidable by running fewer "gadgets" on the desktop environment, it can be triggered and cause lockups even if the system in question is otherwise good-performing. Installing a Linux desktop doesn't solve this type of problem (though this specific bug doesn't exist).

The questions worth discussing are, why/how does it happen? how can we make these problems easier to diagnose? what kind of programming language design can help? what kind of operating system/browser architecture can help? how can we manage complexity, and the problems came with such complexity, what is its implications in software engineering, parallel programming? etc.

From another perspective, bloated software is also an on-topic question worth talking about. But instead of the talking point of "useless programs wasting CPU cycles", or "install minimum Debian", we can ask questions like "do _ALL_ modern software/browser/OS have to be as complex as this?", "what road has led us towards this complexity nowadays?", "what encouraged people to make such decisions?", "can we return to a simpler software design, sometimes?" (e.g. a vendor machine near my home, trivially implementable in BusyBox, or even a microcontroller, are now coming with full Windows 7 or Ubuntu desktop! Even the advertising screens use Windows 8, and BSoD sometimes, despite all they need to do is just showing a picture. same thing for modern personal computers.), or even "is Web 2.0 a mistake?" (so we are here on Hacker News, one of the fastest website in the world!). These topics are also interesting to talk.

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

#168

Post by dasmoth » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #147

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).

nobody is forced

Pretty certain Google Apps administrators can disable IMAP and POP for their organizations.

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

#169

Post by fetbaffe » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #40

emilsedgh wrote: post #6

Gmail and Inbox both hang for me on my Chrome on Linux with almost no load. It's funny how tides turn. Initially Gmail was the king of performance.

Try using Outlook. Gmail is a Ferrari in comparison.

Outlook.com was super snappy when it arrived, today is super slow. "Modern" web development always ends up here.

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

#170

Post by arendtio » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #144

cordite wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wonder why so many are talking about SSD vs. HDD in this discussion. From my experience on Linux it doesn't really matter if you have enough RAM. Yes, booting from a SSD is faster, but once everything is loaded the system mostly works on top of the RAM (waiting for FS sync is rare).

I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.