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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

#231

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

vectorEQ wrote: post #186
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…

agree, this kind of issues exists in any highly complicated systems which need to take into account memory security etc. I dont think a lot of people realise that modern browsers are about as complicated as the operating systems they run in and have about as much counter measures for security problems as the OS undernearth it. To manage these systems resources securely and not have them fight eachother in the process…

> I dont think a lot of people realise that modern browsers are about as complicated as the operating systems they run in and have about as much counter measures for security problems as the OS undernearth it.

There's an argument to be made that maybe 'security' isn't worth as much as the blogosphere thinks it is. Like everything else in life, it's a trade off, and because it is in their best interest the security "experts" do their best to sensationalize and promote paranoia and over-reaction to every little potential problem without regard for the cost, namely inconvenience and slow software.

What was the solution to Meltdown and Spectre again? Oh yeah, make everything slower on the off chance someone will use a timing attack to maybe slowly exfiltrate some information from memory that might be important. If you're a cloud host that tradeoff is probably worth it, if you're a desktop user outside of an intelligence organization it probably isn't, but you'll pay the cost none the less. 1% here, 2% there, no big deal right? But it sure adds up. Do an experiment: install 2 VMs, one with Windows Server 2016 (or Windows 10), and one with Windows Server 2003 (Or Windows XP). The 2003 (XP) VM will be so much more responsive it will freak you out because you aren't used to it. How much of your life has been wasted waiting for windows to appear and start drawing their contents? What are we getting in exchange?

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

#232

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

arendtio wrote: post #170
exikyut wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 confi…

> Yes, booting from a SSD is faster

Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.

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

#233

Post by Koshkin »

tralarpa wrote: post #185
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…

> The questions worth discussing are Interesting that you ask how to diagnose and manage the complexity, but not how to avoid it. Do we really need a more or less complete OS+VM (aka web browser) running on top of another OS (Windows etc.) to read e-mails?

Likewise, one could ask if we need all this to read any sort of text - news, articles, etc.

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

#234

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jakeogh wrote: post #193
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 got annoyed enough to auto -STOP every tab but the one in the foreground (using surf [with or without tabbed] and a bunch of X glue), coupled with JS disabled by default is very nice. It's got bugs, but I'll add the X plumbing to my version of surf sometime soon: https://github.com/jakeogh/glide

Thanks, this looks really nice. How are you sending SIGSTOP to background tabs? (assuming its not built in to glide; I didn't see it mentioned in the README)

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

#235

Post by polkadotted »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #232
arendtio wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 confi…

> Yes, booting from a SSD is faster Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.

This is a blatant lie that needs to stop. I've been using linux exclusively on laptops for more than 10 years. The first 5 with the HP EliteBook like, currently with Lenovo X1 line.

On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10.

We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, which is OS-assisted. The X1 Yoga with S3 can both suspend and resume faster than windows 10, despite not having S0I3 (and has longer battery lifetime to booth).

And by fast I mean that by the time the lid is up, the OS is ready. By contrast, windows 10 seems to always shuffle for several seconds after resume, even on the carbon 6th gen.

So please...

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

#236

Post by mikekchar »

zaarn wrote: post #122
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…

It's simple: Bad Engineering is cheaper. Just today on Patreon, I was going through a creators posts. After about 100 posts or so the page was barely usable. Animations took minutes to complete, loading more posts took 30 seconds and Firefox (Chrome quit after 80 posts when Linux' OOM decided that the fun was over) was struggling to repaint the view port, lots of white areas. At the end other applications were severe…

What's weird is, I have 8G (edit: it did say megs -- of course I have more than that :-) ) of memory and no swap. Never OOMed this machine in 3 years of development work. My colleagues run out of memory constantly. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't some other problem that isn't obvious. I run a very tight ship -- nothing runs on my machine that I don't know about. I'm going to go have a look at the Patreon page and see what happens...

Edit: Apart from being able to confirm the less-than-stellar performance problems, I had no trouble with memory at all. Chromium hovered at about 2G of memory. It fairly aggressively garbage collected as I browsed different sections and different creators.

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

#237

Post by phkahler »

blub wrote: post #200
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…

We could ask a lot of questions, but at the end of the day system complexity will increase the likelyhood of so-called "system accidents" for any type of system, not just SW. One of the most effective measures to combat such issues is to... reduce the system's complexity. E.g. by not having another VM running on top of the OS just to read and write e-mail. Since this won't happen any time soon due to various reasons,…

It was eye opening to me when there was mention of a 2 TiB map being created and something about 128MiB chunks. I'd just like to smack the person that thought that was a good idea. I can understand thoughts like "but the blocks won't actually be allocated" or some such, but you have to step back and say "WTF are you even doing with anything that large?" Control freak.

And yes, web browsers are becoming an OS on their own. I consider that a failure of the underlying OSes we have. Tabbed browsers are awesome, but they exist because OSes and standard desktops (GUI toolkits) didn't come up with decent ways to handle that. Browsers are also trying to implement fine grained access to resources - because our OSes haven't managed to do that for them yet. Memory management? I have no idea why you'd do that in ANY application software today. Actually there is a reason - people don't trust the OS or think they can do something better, but it ends up creating extra complexity. Complexity is categorically bad and should be avoided unless it's the only way to do something. Remember how X got its own memory and font management? Same thing.

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

#239

Post by O_H_E »

themodelplumber wrote: post #81
O_H_E wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox have extensions on mobile, plus ads make websites heavier, and suck more bandwidth _____________________________ Says the person with +500 tabs on chrome android

+500. Whoa. I hit the :D face and sweep all my open tabs into Pocket.

From chrome???

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

#240

Post by harperlee »

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…

One thing can't wrap my head around: if I receive a big (10Mb) email through a slow connection, Outlook completely freezes until the email has finished downloading. I'm talking, not even rendering correctly, and showing white rectangles instead of drawing components. How on earth can this not be a tested use case? Is there no separate thread to connect to the Internet?
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