Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#391

Post by tremon » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

HeckFeck wrote: post #156

MereInterest wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am of the opinion that anything that was possible in computing 15 years ago should be perceptibly instant today. There are obvious exceptions such as cross-continent communication being limited by the speed of light, but as a general rule. Instead, we get software that's written as if Dennard scaling were still occurring.

When I was a child, I had a reverent wonder for technology and all it might do in the future. Realisations like this replaced that with a dry cynicism. My inner child is disappointed.

When I was a child, I was thinking how amazing it would be if I could store all my games floppy disk on a single, network-accessible drive so that I could access them all without installing and swapping them all the time.

Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit.

I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#392

Post by ectopod » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #352

tallanvor wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benchmarks are hard to compare. He's using a VM and a fairly small amount of RAM (I don't know of many PCs only shipping with 4GB RAM these days). I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.

4GB is actually pretty common for "budget" laptops in india. Check out Amazon.in and search for laptops. Anything above 40,000 inr is in the higher than budget, cheap range. For the past few years, there has been a trend of buying refurbished devices. Laptops and desktops. I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here. Oh,…

4GB is standard on cheaper laptops in the UK as well. 8GB is midrange and if you want more you're paying a premium price (or upgrading it yourself).

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#393

Post by ectopod » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

cheschire wrote: post #327

ksec wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I have been banging on about for years . Latency added, not just in Software, but in Hardware as well from Display, Keyboard, Mouse and even Network. The past 20+ years the whole industry nearly went all out on optimising for throughput. Sometimes I look at macOS, Windows 10. Apart from some UI facelift I dont even remember a single user feature that was relevant or important in the past 5 years. Apart f…

"Finally" seems a bit myopic. The war against latency has been going on continuously since the beginning, even in gaming. Check out nearly any content John Carmack has ever written or spoken on the topic of gaming or VR, just as one example.

For those of us who grew up with 8-bit home computers low latency was the starting point. On my first computer you could detect a keypress, update video memory and (assuming the beam was in the right place) see the results on screen in a few microseconds.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#394

Post by rightbyte » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #342

samplatt wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave it one star and left a scathing review. What are they going to do, not include a calculator in the next Windows?

They can not include it and instead provide a menu option that actually takes you to the store on first run :)

Don't give them any ideas please.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#395

Post by tremon » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #292

brudgers wrote: post #68

Some remarks: I used Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). 32GB fixed disk for each build. That is much much less than the typical Windows 10 hardware. the fast boot feature has been disabled for the purposes of this measurement. That is not the default and not reflective of most installations.

> That is not how most end user installations are configured (aka, not as a virtual machine). IIRC if virtualization is turned on in BIOS, the host Windows itself effectively runs as a hypervisor-backed machine. I still think the tests aren't really representative, though.

Only if the Hyper-V role is installed, which it isn't by default IIRC.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#396

Post by rightbyte » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

ShroudedNight wrote: post #335

nso wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this?

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telemetry related. Resmon will frequently show ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) files getting a detrimental quantity of I/O directed their way, especially at boot...

Ye sometimes my Win10 computer slows down alot and there is some telemetry service in the tasklist hogging like 5% CPU. The malware service is also a thief. I mean they could just make those run at like 1/5 speed and it would be fine. Add some sleep() ...

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#397

Post by scns » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

easton wrote: post #145

brundolf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?

It actually is the opposite of what you say, in that the Fast Boot feature of Windows 10 is basically logging you out then hibernating the system, which is faster on HDDs but slower on SSDs (or at best the same speed of a cold boot, but at the expense of system stability in the long term since NT really likes its reboots). It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but…

It is possible to disable fastboot in the system settings. You need to do it if you want to dual boot linux.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#398

Post by speedgoose » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

kroltan wrote: post #254

samplatt wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes. Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and Mac…

Right? I opened a Windows XP VM inside my 10 box a bit ago to play an old game, and oh boy was that incredibly snappy compared to what we have now. Sure, it's running in anachronistic hardware, but where did we go wrong? 3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.

I remember XP not being able to paint windows or move the mouse cursor at descent frame-rate under load. It was so bad compared to Mac OS X from the same time.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#399

Post by Wowfunhappy » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 11:01 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #328

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is really what's making the difference... I wonder if these mitigations shouldn't be automatically enabled for home users. The chances of Spectre or Meltdown actually managing to acquire sensitive data seems incredibly low. Is that worth the very large performance impact?

Spectre and meltdown aren’t often used because of the mitigations in modern operating systems. The attacks are complex and the chance of finding a vulnerable machine is low. But if instead windows users were all vulnerable, you bet all sorts of scammy websites would go after these vulnerabilities. And the attacks are really bad - they can read arbitrary memory. What are the chances another browser tab has a bank webs…

> And the attacks are really bad - they can read arbitrary memory.

But—and please tell me if I’m just totally wrong about this—my understanding was they can read random memory, right? The attacker can’t control what they get.

Out of the gigabytes of memory on a system, I’d expect only a handful of bytes to be actually valuable, and only then if certain combinations can be retrieved together.

Re: Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

#400

Post by drpixie » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 11:34 AM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #190

sharms wrote: post #146

Disappointed I didn't see fairly reasonable explanations around processor security bugs which impact broad system performance such as Spectre and Meltdown. This has a significant impact on Linux and Microsoft has even outlined that these fixes impact their performance (there have been many more security bugs identified since): https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2018/01/09/understan...

What I find most disappointing is that even processors manufactured TODAY contain these flaws and have performance hits put into the firmware. This issue is so fundamental to how CPU caches work, that there really is not a true performance-neutral fix.

The Spectre/Meltdown issues are fundamental and "difficult" to fix - but mostly exist because we can observe state using very fine grained performance counters. Why not disable (or dumb down) the performance counters, and leave the bugs and better performance in place?

We could enable the counters (and the mask bugs and reduce performance) by normally-off a BIOS flag. I for one would rather have the performance and don't need the counters for day-to-day ops.