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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

#291

Post by tomaskafka »

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…

I should probably make a video of me opening an i7 2017 Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and waiting 3-5 seconds until the system allows me to type the password (also, I sometimes switch to Czech keyboard, and High Sierra has a bug where it randomly shows one input language as active in a top right but actually uses a different input language in a password field - this happens in about half of login attempts).

This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.

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

#292

Post by tomaskafka »

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.

Really? It works for someone like this? Damn you Apple, not for me :(.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17786400

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

#293

Post by merinowool »

c3534l wrote: post #183
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…

A brand new laptop I bought this year can't run Windows 10, the system is basically unusable. Not a cheap laptop, either, it was one of the more expensive ones. It runs Ubuntu no problem. All of Microsofts products seem to have latency issues, and I still can't figure out for the life of me why it takes longer to open a file in Visual Studio or in Word on my gaming desktop than it does to load a current year $60 vide…

It is probably all the spying /s

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

#294

Post by exikyut »

johnchristopher wrote: post #163
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...

> 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.

On FreeBSD, at least, you can tinker with the sshd to switch between PAM, to get "Password: " and some other sshd-internal mechanism, which prints "'s password: " instead. Kind of cute.

And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.

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

#295

Post by speedplane »

dasmoth wrote: post #152
speedplane wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember old Mac OS 9. If you started a print job, and held down the mouse holding down a click, the printer would just stop. The entire system wasn't properly multi-threaded.

That’s something that I remember people in my circle joking about at the time, but in retrospect maybe the joke was on us. User input should always be absolute top priority, and if that means something else has to stop then so be it. (Although with 24 cores...)

To your point, I also remember working with early windows systems and when the network went down for a moment, the mouse and screen would freeze. Given the two options, Most would probably take the Mac.

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

#296

Post by speedplane »

fipple wrote: post #153
speedplane wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just UI programming, almost all programming is single threaded. What programmer wants to deal with threads, really? They only do because they need to get more performance out of a chip. And that leads us to the real problem. Chips are not advancing at the rate they should. Additional performance gains come from adding multiple chips to the same die, not making the chips faster. This forces programmers to think ab…

> Chips are not advancing at the rate they should. A weird interpretation of a singular event in the history of technology. No wheel maker complained because wood wasn’t getting twice as strong every 18 months.

Moore’s law and folks like Ray Kurzweil have for decades been driving the point that this isn’t a single event, but a trend that will continue indefinitely. I don’t buy it myself, but it’s now become conventional wisdom.

We’ve been taught for decades that chips will double in performance every 18 months (I know Moore said transistor count, not performance). It’s now turning out to be untrue. We think about the singularity all the time, but haven’t properly considered what will happen if technology improvements stall.

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

#297

Post by speedplane »

oso2k wrote: post #279
speedplane wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has nothing to do with Moore's Law or improving processors directly. If anything, this is a software optimization problem. Half of what I mentioned was locks and schedulers, which are directly software problems. Layer on the fact that a helloworld application in most languages and frameworks is 100s of KB to dozens of MBs, and you have really, really, unoptimized software. 30 years ago, lots of software was writ…

> This has nothing to do with Moore's Law or improving processors directly. If anything, this is a software optimization problem.

This is such a contradictory sentence. The whole point of Moore's law was that software developers could do what they want, freed by limitations of hardware because in 18 months, when their product was ready for launch, the hardware became capable enough to handle it.

Forcing developers to focus more and more on performance (via threading, distributed systems, and custom die co-processors), rather than innovating new applications, is a huge shift. It's like the hardware developers gave up, and tell the software developers that it's in your hands now.

Also, comparing a hello world program 10 years ago to today is a meaningless comparison because no one uses hello world to do anything. A better example would be Excel in 1998 and Excel in 2018. Sure today, it's a 500 megabytes instead of a just a handful, but it does quite a bit more (for better or worse).

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

#298

Post by speedplane »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #143
speedplane wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If every OS required async calls, it would require every developer to learn async programming. They probably wouldn't learn it properly, and you'd end up with more race conditions and bugs than if async was optional.

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

#299

Post by speedplane »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #277
bennofs wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the lock in the article kind of async? From my understanding, the problem was not the wait time on the lock alone, but that the lock is not fair: so even if you asynchrounously locked, someone else (in this case the WMI scan) can get the lock everytime before you get it so you are blocked a long time (you cannot continue with this particular operation until you get the lock, even in the async case).

In the article, they illustrate a poor design choice. Or probably more likely, a continuation of the programming practice utilized elsewhere in the kernel. That being, slap a lock on any resource contention. That practice is necessitated solely by the need to support a linear calling interface. Even if this particular issue were to be fixed through queuing instead of locking, the existence of locks elsewhere will sti…

Don’t see the fundamental difference between locks and queues. In a system that uses locks, the kernel can still internally use queues to grant some lock requests before others.

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

#300

Post by speedplane »

exikyut wrote: post #150
speedplane wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GPUs can just do fast matrix multiplications in parallel, but it’s up to the developer to reframe their software into matrix multiplications. For some applications it’s great, but for most it isn’t realistic.

Also if General processors are now hitting a wall, it’s only a matter of time before GPUs do.

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