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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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found alt-f2 then r (ie. restarting gnome) puts it back in as good a state as a fresh boot. Sometimes my extensions won't load and this also restarts those.

This doesn’t work under Wayland. Is there a way to something similar on Wayland.

Using Fedora 27 with Wayland, I have not found a way to do this other than logging out and back in :/

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, whic…

My wife just got the Carbon 6th gen. There is an ACPI patch to restore S3. See https://delta-xi.net/#056. Once you've got the patched dsdt.aml, I highly recommend not following their directions, and just loading the file in grub by creating /boot/grub/custom.cfg with the line:

acpi patched_dsdt.aml

This has the advantage of not requiring any manual intervention every time your kernel is updated. The downside is that if you try to dual boot W10, it will BSOD on boot with an ACPI error. To overcome this, take the original dsdt.aml and load it in a custom (not auto-probed) menu entry for windows. You can just clone the auto-probed line, and add before the chainloader line:

acpi old_dsdt.aml

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

#253
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s keeping track of 16k blocks of memory that way. If you changed it to 4MB you’d have to track and scan 512k.

We have a GIANT address space to play with. Why not use it?

They’re not actually using 128MB per function.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just stayed with Mate with Compiz (Ubuntu Mate) and my desktop is still as snappy as it was during Gnome 2 days. I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness. I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.

KDE Plasma is written mostly in QML, so JavaScript.

Mostly? Nope, just the UI elements. Much of the heavy lifting is done by KDE framework and Qt libraries (C++).

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

#255
post #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 wha…

Vodafone CZ have this same aggressive throttling on their pre-pay monthly tariffs with the extremely annoying feature that if you run out of data it is basically impossible to top-up unless you're on wifi because they don't exclude Vodafone CZ sites or IP addresses from the throttling!

It was even worse a few years back - once you had used your data allowance you had no way whatsoever to top up at all.

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

#256
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…

You might find this study of computer latency across 40 years of hardware interesting

http://danluu.com/input-lag/

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

#258
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up going to Thunderbird for my main email addresses (work & personal), with Rainmail for quasi-disposable addresses on my various domains. Works much better than Gmail did towards the end of my years using Gmail.

I have to use Thunderbird for work and I wish it was 1% as good as Gmail. The search sucks, it's slow to receive mail, it crashes quite often. Either your Gmail is profoundly broken or you have a magic Thunderbird. In case the latter is true: do you have any tips to optimise Thunderbird?

Have been running Thunderbird for G-Apps based work email for over a year (Fedora 26,27). Using the Provider for Google Calendar extension works well for integrating calendar into Thunderbird.

Other than fighting with the calendar occasionally (sometimes needing to force a manual sync to see coworkers' events), Gmail in Thunderbird has been pretty smooth. I have not noticed slow search, slow mail receipt, or application crashes. In fact, the search is often too good, in that after running it it matches hundreds of more emails than I usually expect. I usually stick with the quick filter which is a bit less flexible, but generally returns more useful results.

Another advantage, on Linux at least, is that if you copy your ~/.thunderbird folder to another machine, all accounts, GUI layouts, settings, search results, tabs, etc move over flawlessly. I think you just have to re-sign in for Google accounts on the new machine and you are good to go.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Locks are hard. Yes, especially when the OS does nothing to help a backing-off contender acquire a resource that is greedily dropped and contended by another thread. > I'll go into more details in part two Great! In anticipation of that, I have a couple questions: > but part of the problem would have reliably disappeared if I had been running a single-core CPU Single-core or single-thread? Does the atomic instructi…

On a single-core/single-thread Windows system the problem would be avoided because when the waiting thread is signaled it gets a priority boost. With just a single core this boost means that it gets to run instead of the other thread. With multiple cores it gets to run as well as the other thread.

Making the locks fair or occasionally fair would solve this problem, but perhaps cause others.

I think that an appropriate CPU-saturating background task might have made my machine more responsive, which is deliciously weird.

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

#260

This never happens with Thunderbird or K9 Mail.

Actually, I run Thunderbird on Linux and have frequent issues with it pausing and hanging on me. (Among other issues related to it seemingly just having trouble handling large amounts of email -- but that's not important to dive into here.)

Let's not act like other complex software isn't also likely to end up with similar issues.

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