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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

#71

Post by sfink »

johngalt wrote: post #63
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.

Yeah, but if you back up a decade, the improvements were anything but incremental. Even a 2 year upgrade was a massively noticeable improvement.

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

#72

Post by sfink »

posixplz wrote: post #33
coldcode wrote: post #24

My MBP only has 8 cores but often times during the day it locks up and blows up a hurricane of fan noise. Why? Idiotic Jamf management software and a virus checker that never finds anything. Some days you only get 1 core for work when it gets stuck and have to reboot to get it back. It's not always the computer, OS or the software you use.

Yep, Jamf and McAfee are both trash-quality software that significantly reduce the overall security of a system. McAfee is a well-known story: their AV unpacks and analyses potential malware via a kernel module. Wtf? Jamf's code quality and security model are abysmal. It blows my mind that apple recommends the use of Jamf to large Mac shops. Having peeked under the hood at previous employers, I was extremely disappoi…

There was a time that running Windows absolutely required you to use an antivirus solution. It was crazy not to.

Those days are past. Now you have to be crazy to run one. Even setting security aside, I think antivirus packages are the number one source of instability and weird performance problems.

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

#73

Post by binmanthrowaway »

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 fitted my laptop with 118GB Optane drive (intel 800p). My builds run twice as fast now. I wouldn't achieve this by swapping CPU.

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

#74

Post by thinkythought »

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 desktops, i would say it was the 2nd gen of the core i series(2xxx, like the 2500k). For laptops, definitely the original retina macbook pro in 2012.

I'm still using that machine, i try out new stuff every few months. I still don't see the point. I load it down pretty heavily all the time and it still kicks right through it just like it did when i took it out of the box.

If it breaks, i'll just buy another similar one. They're not much over $500 now and it's an amazing amount of computer for that price even in 2018(19?). My only regret is not maxing out the ram and storage really, but that's on me.

I've never felt this way until now, i used to wish i could justify a new machine every year or two and often would. I think i didn't keep a laptop for over a year and a half until i got this one... But now i just don't care. I don't own a single machine with a newer cpu than this one, and my desktop still does great too with a 3770 and a couple SSDs.

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

#75

Post by bluejekyll »

DonHopkins wrote: post #68
bluejekyll wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember XULRunner, but never used it. Do you know if it was any lighter weight, or how much so, than Electron?

> 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.

I agree completely. The issue that I mainly see, with the possible exception of Linux, it's a drop in the bucket of number of users (and has it's own issues GDK vs. QT/KDE), the main adversaries have traditionally been the OS builders. They actively seem to be intentionally creating a walled garden model.

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

#76

Post by bluejekyll »

pjc50 wrote: post #50
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.

The incentives are all messed up due to how we pay (or don't) for software; this is similar to how it's much easier to waste viewer's battery and bandwidth showing adverts than it is to charge them money.

Isn't this mainly because of the OS builders? MS, Apple, and Google? The only cross platform GUI system they all support at this point is browser based UIs. And given that developers basically any UI dev practically needs to target the web now, I don't see why this is surprising.

We seem to be blaming developers, but developers are just dealing with an ecosystem where this is the best common denominator. There's another comment in this thread, that points out that Electron is only 5 years old, and there is a lot of opportunity for performance and system utilization improvement.

IMHO if we want this to be better, then the OSes should make this easier and more performant for developers, and by extension, then their platforms will out perform and outsell the others.

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

#77

Post by kayamon »

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…

See here for a good ticketing mutex that fairly solves the problem:

- https://stackoverflow.com/a/5386266

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

#78

Post by bluejekyll »

geodel wrote: post #64
bluejekyll wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

> That is ridiculous comment to start with.

Is it, really? Let's drop the web as one of the platforms we don't want to target. There are some reasonable options left, but when you add the web in, and just limit that to the major browsers, your requirements for support just got extremely more complex. Why do you want to target the web? because in general, that's the easiest place for user acquisition and on-boarding of a product.

And where did you get this: "Seems you really believe it is users problem that they do not upgrade their phones and computers every couple of years." This is a decision people need to make in how they target certain users. If your target user base has limited compute available, limited bandwidth, limited memory, etc., then of course you need to build software that meets your business requirements.

There are no victims here, there are users, potential users, and former pissed off users who've gone elsewhere. These are all business decisions you need to make as a developer. If you target Electron and by doing so piss off all your users and they ditch your software, then you screwed up. But I only see VSCode gaining in usage, even Slack being a horrible memory hog, they're still gaining customers.

In a nutshell, there are companies that are being very successful with this, success is hard to argue with, as much as you might dislike the way it's being achieved.

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

#79

Post by michrassena »

sorenjan wrote: post #35
bluejekyll wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron gets a lot of hate, but I think people generally are looking at the wrong thing when focusing on memory usage, ask yourself why it’s so important to so many organizations. The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Java was there, but that never really took off for embedded UI inside the browser, and the browser became the primary targe…

Yes, ever since computers became "fast enough" developers have traded user's efficiency for their own. It's faster to write, but slower to run. The difference is that it's written once but run thousands or millions of times each day. It's distributed waste of resources, and it adds up.

The conservation of developer's time (and company money) at the expense of the users' time and money is the epitome of an externality. It's clear that we'd all be a bit better off if user's time was valued more. But who's going to pay to make that happen?

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

#80

Post by sangnoir »

keldaris wrote: post #44
bluejekyll wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no such thing and I would argue there shouldn't be. The notion that you could use a "nearly identical UI/UX" across a desktop application, a mobile application and a web page invariably leads to horrible results. The usecases are just too different. The only reason people pretend otherwise is laziness and cost cutting - a context in which Electron seems reasonable as well, to the horror of technically litera…

> There is no such thing and I would argue there shouldn't be

It's one thing to not want to use Electron app, it's another to say no one should use them. It rubs me the wrong way. There are a lot of things I'd never use, but they don't rile me to that level.

> The only reason people pretend otherwise is laziness and cost cutting - a context in which Electron seems reasonable as well, to the horror of technically literate users everywhere.

"Laziness and cost cutting" is just your label for trade-offs you don't agree with. That would apply to cross-platform Java/Swing apps or Gnome. The "technically literate" users don't have to worry about business considerations and engineering tradeoffs - the authors do. If memory usage is such a big deal, then the market will self-correct, I was told it's a meritocracy.

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