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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

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

#61

Post by krautsourced »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

For me too it was swapping my HDDs for SSDs. Also, getting 64GB RAM (I do lots of video and stuff).

Everything else, moving from CPU generations to newer generations, _felt_ like it barely made a dent.

GPU rendering via CUDA also meant a massive jump.

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

#62

Post by rconti »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

When I finally was able to upgrade from 4MB to 16MB of RAM on my Linux box in ~95-96, I went from constant swapping to FAST COMPUTER. Seriously, I had no idea compiling a kernel could be fast. It was taking something like 7-8 hours and I just thought it was a lot of work (though it is, of course).

The next time I compiled a kernel took something like 8 minutes. I couldn't believe my eyes as the steps flew by on the console.

Other than "adequate RAM" I'll go for "SSD" like everyone else. Now adequate RAM doesn't even matter all that much because swapping is so fast (relatively speaking).

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

#63

Post by johngalt »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

It is rare to notice small improvements differences when they are delivered incrementally. You would notice if you went back to that machine from 7 years ago and tried to use it today.

There is also the idle nature of most computer usage. That next gen i7 will not load Facebook appreciably faster. CPU limited tasks could be only 5% of normal use. So a 20% improvement for 5% of the time.

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

#64

Post by geodel »

bluejekyll wrote: post #34
boomlinde wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.

See my response to a similar sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 My basic point there being that losing a small number of users due to these concerns is probably worth it. I don't want to come across as someone who's hyper-defensive of Electron. I hate the fact that such a bloated piece of software has become the standard means for supporting cross-platform development. At the same time, I…

> I'm curious though, is there something you would recommend instead that meets these requirements with a single codebase (~90% shared code): target all major platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux) and target all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, IE), (edit: and how could I forget, all major phone browsers) with nearly identical UI/UX?

That is ridiculous comment to start with. You might as well say that something's name has to start with an 'E' ends with 'n' and is 8 letter word and developed by Chrome browser team.

If it were not a software, I think it would right in category of 'blame the victim'. Seems you really believe it is users problem that they do not upgrade their phones and computers every couple of years.

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

#65

Post by arminiusreturns »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

It's not the hardware per se, it's the software. On my various sysadmin forums I've never seen so many "I went full gnu/linux and am never looking back!" Posts. Windows has been shitting the bed for a long time now and 7 was just the outlier in the trend. Hardware, especially m2 and data ssd do make a difference, but it's mostly bad software people are Stockholm syndromed into using that is the problem.

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

#66

Post by zwieback »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

+1 on the SSD. I've declined my companys managed PC upgrade twice now because performance increases are negligible and build quality got worse (at least on the models we were offered).

I agree that laptops/batteries have gotten smaller at the same price/performance point, though. Very good for my company.

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

#67

Post by brucedawson »

raattgift wrote: post #13

Could you build on the always-unfair system along these lines? (C11ish, sorry) void do_work(the_work_t *w) { /* for simplicity here, rather than e.g. w->contenders */ static _Atomic int contenders = 0; contenders++; for ( ; work_remaining(w); ) { take_mutex(w->m); do_some_work(w); drop_mutex(w->m); if (contenders > 1) reschedule_this_thread(); } contenders--; } This depends on the OS providing a cheap and fast resche…

The trick is how you implement reschedule this thread. What you want in this specific case is to take it off-core long enough for another thread to wake up and take the lock. That is far too squishy a goal to be something that you can implement. If you sleep for some number of nanoseconds then you are wasting performance and/or not sleeping long enough.

In this particular case the lock was a kernel lock in kernel code so the OS would have to fix this, by making the locks fair (or occasionally fair).

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

#68

Post by DonHopkins »

bluejekyll wrote: post #34
boomlinde wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.

See my response to a similar sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 My basic point there being that losing a small number of users due to these concerns is probably worth it. I don't want to come across as someone who's hyper-defensive of Electron. I hate the fact that such a bloated piece of software has become the standard means for supporting cross-platform development. At the same time, I…

I think there's an inevitable undeniable need some something like Electron, but it needs to be well supported and ubiquitous.

Before Electron there was xulrunner, whose main purpose in life was to be the cross platform application layer of the Firefox web browser.

Even though it was officially an unreleased "technology experiment", xulrunner was successfully used both internally at Mozilla to develop Thunderbird and Sunbird, and externally to develop other cross-platform desktop apps like TomTom Home, Uploadr, Nightingale, Songbird, Miro, Joost, Lotus Notes, etc.

But xulrunner was never as fully fleshed out and widely used as Electron, and Mozilla was never serious enough about supporting xulrunner as a platform for other applications, for it to be viable in the long term.

It never caught on and became a standard, and now it's obsolete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

>XULRunner is a "technology experiment", not a shipped product, meaning there are no "official" XULRunner releases, only stable builds based on the same code as a corresponding Firefox release.

>Mozilla stopped supporting the development of XULrunner in July 2015.

In order to solve the problem of every application shipping with its own web browser, there needs to be ONE standard Electron shell that can run all those simple apps and even the advanced ones, and apps need to be able safely include their own native code extensions.

Many people developing Electron apps explicitly and legitimately WANT their app to include the whole web browser, just so they don't have to expend any effort supporting other browsers.

Electron needs to mature and become stable enough that there can be one global install that runs all apps.

But that requires long term support, and a big enough well funded team working on it full time.

Just as all the successful corporations who built on top of OpenSSH have an moral obligation to support its developers, I think successful companies making money by shipping big fat Electron apps today have a moral obligation to support the development of a standard Electron shell.

Think of it as buying carbon credits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit

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

#69

Post by brucedawson »

atesti wrote: post #3

What exactly did his it department do using wmi to query this Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfProc_ProcessAddressSpace_Costly? I can't find this in the article

The actual high-level query is in part one and in the first reply, but I think your real question is "why did they want to scan the address space of every process on the system?"

I think that the answer is that they didn't. That was just one of the bazillion counters that came along for the ride. I believe that that counter has been removed in the latest OS, thus squishing this bug in another way.

I don't understand WMI, but it sounds really weird. One peculiarity is that once some program asks for counters "WMI refreshes the list of counters every 2 minutes until the WMI helper process closes due to inactivity."

So that's great. IT asks for some data, they get memory scans that they don't want, and those scans are repeated every two minutes for a while (ten minutes?) even though nobody is looking at the results.

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

#70

Post by sfink »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

This is heavily correlated with your age (or, as you put it, "years in the business".) We old-timers clearly remember the days of Moore's Law, or more precisely, the days when Moore's Law had a direct impact on single-processor performance.

For me, every upgrade was at least a factor of two improvement to pretty much everything. It was a qualitative difference -- things that just didn't make sense to run were now reasonable to do, things that meant leaving it overnight could now be kicked off before going to lunch or whatever, things that required scheduling were now causes for slashdot breaks (age, remember?), and those minutes-long jobs were now something you could run and wait for without context switching.

I could go on for one more step -- except that's kind of where it ended, at least for reliable improvements. Stuff that was almost buttery smooth might become buttery smooth, but stuff that was buttery smooth already might start lagging some here and there.

These days upgrades are more about SSDs, RAM, decaying batteries that tip you over the edge, connectors, or maybe the collection of weird compatibility problems (eg 3 monitor support) that you've sort of worked around but the workarounds are breaking down, and you have this naive notion that the latest greatest laptop will magically be more robust. (Instead, you usually just trade over to a different set of problems.)

I'd agree that the SSD switch was the biggest boost in recent memory, and it's been about a decade since I've experienced one of those glorious upgrades of yore. And I miss them -- the heady excitement of everything being better is now replaced with a nervous inventory of everything I need to work or think might be improved, trying it all out in hopes of feeling some improvement or at least having it continue to work.

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