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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

#221

Post by renox »

raarts wrote: post #136
jcelerier wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel ( https://liquorix.net/ )

You would assume that big guys like RedHat would already have done this for you.

RedHat's business is servers' support: it's quite logical that the desktop they provide is as much as possible similar to the server's configuration because developers will test on their workstation.. So no, I don't expect that RedHat will do this.

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

#222

Post by rasz »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #205
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…

Windows 10 is really inconsistent. I have it running in a VM on a Fedora host and it's snappy as hell. Also on a pretty basic office-spec Celeron, but then running it on a new Ryzen 7 sometimes it lags. I don't think it's directly related to the performance of the hardware, there must be something else going on.

Windows 10 has all kids of debuggers enabled on millions of computers, MS calls this telemetry :) Go to Management and check out startup event trace sessions. Those are the source of mysterious >hundreds of megabytes of logs written to disk per day.

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

#223

Post by renox »

feintruled wrote: post #217
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 remember back in the Amiga days, the processes for the GUI would be totally separate from the program logic. Add the pre-emptive multitasking and you would have GUI elements that would respond instantly always, even when the rest of your program was hung! Of course, the button callbacks wouldn't fire, but the button would appear to press, you could move windows, etc. Did a lot to reduce the perception of lag, whils…

The Amiga didn't have multiple address space so that's cheating.. I've never used an Amiga but BeOS was really much more responsive than either Linux or Windows but that was before SSD and multiple cores were available so maybe now the difference would be much less noticeable.. There is Haiku (in alpha or beta) but AFAIK it hasn't any native modern web browser..

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

#224

Post by larschdk »

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 don't think thread prioritization is the cause of the apparent lag. We've gone from mostly synchronous systems to highly asynchronous systems. Typing on a keyboard used to be a hardware interrupt that would also print instantly on the screen. Now it's a serial bus being polled every few milliseconds, followed by a buffer copy between kernel and user space, with a/several memory allocation and transfer of ownership to a GUI thread, that when scheduled may draw the character on the screen using a DOM that needs to be recalculated which requires accessing the memory allocator in the OS which is currently locked by your Android build.

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

#225

Post by abainbridge »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #216
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason) The answer is ever-increasing complexity, no?

Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it conne…

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it.

That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing.

It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.

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

#226

Post by Tobba_ »

bartread wrote: post #84
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…

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…

On Win10 you need to have enough swap space on an SSD; HDD I/O has totally kneecapped latency, seemingly due to blind usage of NCQ (AHCI driver got replaced from Win7), so it chokes out entirely when combined with the even more broken swap manager.

"Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly.

Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.

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

#227

Post by DanielBMarkham »

abainbridge wrote: post #225
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it conne…

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £…

It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do.

When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about.

These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?

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

#228

Post by wscott »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #27

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…

This one seems promising: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/built-in-lazy-l...

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

#229

Post by Spooky23 »

fetbaffe wrote: post #169
Spooky23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I wasn’t even going there.

Outlook the Windows app deserves to be the most awful app ever, but Skype for Business worked harder!

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

#230

Post by snaky »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #194
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #167

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 inh…

I get what you're saying, but it seems you already have a place you want to go and are using the article to get there -- much like the other commenters. While these things are important, to me the critical phrase in the article is this: ...It seems highly improbably that, as one of the most qualified people to diagnose this bug, I was the first to notice it... My system hangs when typing text all of the time. Reading…

That's 80-20 economy which is growing more and more, going hand in hand with "economy of scale". If tens of millions are less than 20 per cent of users - so be it, nobody cares. What does matter is 80 remaining per cent.
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