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Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

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

#421

Post by marcosdumay »

bscphil wrote: post #420
marcosdumay wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmarks? No. That's just my personal experience with different computers. (And by the way, the faster than SSDs claim does not include startup time.) Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays. (I'm quite certain those clauses are illegal here, it's not because of it that I didn't benchmark, but I expect to find none on the web because of it.…

> Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays. Yes, you can still find Windows benchmarks, they're all over the web in fact. The Phoronix test suite supports Windows for example, and Phoronix have a whole series comparing performance between Windows and various Linux distributions: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Windows%20vs . Th…

> And of course none of these cover the question of whether Windows performance would improve running in a Linux VM.

Well, of course not. It's completely absurd that Windows runs better in a VM. When I tried it, I expected my work "computer" at home to be impossible to use, so I would go and fetch some hardware at work. I was very surprised that it actually performed better than the work hardware (on anything that isn't CPU bound). (And yeah, as much as Windows lags behind on those benchmarks, it's not nearly enough to explain what I've seen.)

There is some other comment hinting at the VM ignoring some fsync barrier. I've seen the VM caching a lot of disk IO, but there is probably some very stupid application level choice involved there too. But on Windows, it doesn't have to be fsync, as there is locking too to ruin your day.

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

#422

Post by mackrevinack »

RamRodification wrote: post #152
ergot_vacation wrote: post #81

Over the past decade, software updates in general have mostly become another form of malware, as software makers care more about extracting money from their users or adding pointless shiny features than actually making their software fast, stable, or better able to serve the user. As a result, my default policy now is "If it ain't broke, NEVER fix it." Install, then disable all updates, forcibly if necessary. On Wind…

I can never relate to these posts. I always update all my stuff pretty much immediately when I see an update available. I run Windows, so I'm talking Windows Updates, browser updates, drivers, anything and everything. It actually gives me a pleasant feeling knowing I get bug fixes, security fixes, maybe some new feature every now and then. I'm definitely naive enough to hope for performance improvements rather than w…

sony messed up a phone update a few years ago and it took them maybe two to issue another update to fix it. i can't remember what it was now but it was annoying enough that i stopped updating until a few other people confirmed it was ok.

ive had the same happen with two android apps as well so i have auto-update turned off now and just go through the list a few times a years. if the changelog just says 'buxfixes' but im not noticing any bugs, then i don't bother updating

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

#423

Post by FpUser »

badsectoracula wrote: post #406
FpUser wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends. Many developers are now using Electron, .NET and other tech to develop software. Those are heavy and do not like old computers with limited resources." My desktop products are made in Delphi (compiles to native code) and are very responsive and frugal on resources. Run fine on very old hardware. Desktop products done in C++ would be even better but I am not masochistic enough to develop GUI in C++. At l…

I doubt you'll see any performance difference between Delphi and C++ (even with the most optimizing C++ compilers) outside of heavy number crunching anyway.

For whatever reasons most of my software (desktop and servers) ends up having this "heavy crunching" part in it be it. I usually do not create products that only serve as a simple conduit to a database.

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

#424

Post by jcelerier »

msbarnett wrote: post #418
jcelerier wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isolation had never been sold as a security feature, only as a "user-space crash can't bring down the kernel", no ?

No. Isolation has always been a security feature, not a reliability feature. Consider that local privilege escalations are generally (and I'd say correctly) treated as critical severity issues. Any general purpose process memory read-isolation leak is a quick route to a local privilege escalation, so how could isolation be anything other than a security feature? In its absence, you might as well run everything as roo…

> Consider that local privilege escalations are generally (and I'd say correctly) treated as critical severity issues. Any general purpose process memory read-isolation leak is a quick route to a local privilege escalation, so how could isolation be anything other than a security feature?

https://xkcd.com/1200/

> In its absence, you might as well run everything as root

this is what 99% of people with a home computer did until windows XP (and even then most people today run under an admin account of some sorts on their computers)

isolation between users is only relevant for clusters, it's a super minority usecase versus what is the main thing that matters, home computers which only have one human user anyways. But I guess you'd disagree with Stallman's paragraph at the end here: https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...

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

#425

Post by msbarnett »

jcelerier wrote: post #424
msbarnett wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Isolation has always been a security feature, not a reliability feature. Consider that local privilege escalations are generally (and I'd say correctly) treated as critical severity issues. Any general purpose process memory read-isolation leak is a quick route to a local privilege escalation, so how could isolation be anything other than a security feature? In its absence, you might as well run everything as roo…

> Consider that local privilege escalations are generally (and I'd say correctly) treated as critical severity issues. Any general purpose process memory read-isolation leak is a quick route to a local privilege escalation, so how could isolation be anything other than a security feature? https://xkcd.com/1200/ > In its absence, you might as well run everything as root this is what 99% of people with a home computer…

Yes, I 100% disagree with Stallman's goofy conflation of OS permissions segmentation with aristocracies, and think the idea that the permissions model of the early 1980s is at all workable in the internet era is profoundly, stunningly naive.

The XKCD argument misses the point entirely; if someone p0wns your browser, they p0wn your browser, but what we're talking about is allowing every VSCode extension and Docker image someone installs to read your GMail. It's an absolute dipshit idea that would make every current security problem with computing orders of magnitude worse.

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

#426

Post by badsectoracula »

FpUser wrote: post #423
badsectoracula wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you'll see any performance difference between Delphi and C++ (even with the most optimizing C++ compilers) outside of heavy number crunching anyway.

For whatever reasons most of my software (desktop and servers) ends up having this "heavy crunching" part in it be it. I usually do not create products that only serve as a simple conduit to a database.

Neither do i (in fact i use Delphi and Free Pascal for practically decades now and i never touched a database :-P) - most of my stuff are graphics and geometry related and yet i haven't seen much of a difference between my C or C++ and my Free Pascal (which AFAIK has worse optimizations than modern LLVM-based Delphi) code. Of course i refer to optimizations based on the generated code, algorithmic optimizations are another topic.

The only time i saw a difference when i made a raytracer benchmark[0] explicitly to benchmark the codegen where the Free Pascal codegen at its best was at 177% of the speed of the Clang 8 at its best. In my experience this is not a realistic metric though (according to the benchmark my C 3D engine should be five times slower if compiled in BC++ than Clang but in practice since it does a variety more stuff than just a single thing the performance difference is barely perceptible).

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/raybench/

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

#427

Post by squarefoot »

squarefoot wrote: post #39
boba7 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave them Lubuntu and their scanner app running in WINE. It worked fine but they refused to switch because "it's not muh windows". This is how Microsoft corrupts people for life...

The sad irony being that the Windows UI, starting from Win8, became a complete mess, far more different from say Win7 or even XP than any recent Linux desktop manager. Most of my users, some even over 70 with little computer experience, are doing fine on Linux, but I "converted" them before they had to experience that awful mess, so it has been relatively easy: from XP or Win7 to a customized XFCE (its defaults are u…

> customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical)

Correction: Its defaults are ugly and unpractical on Debian. It looks a lot nicer on Manjaro for example.

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

#428

Post by jcelerier »

msbarnett wrote: post #425
jcelerier wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider that local privilege escalations are generally (and I'd say correctly) treated as critical severity issues. Any general purpose process memory read-isolation leak is a quick route to a local privilege escalation, so how could isolation be anything other than a security feature? https://xkcd.com/1200/ > In its absence, you might as well run everything as root this is what 99% of people with a home computer…

Yes, I 100% disagree with Stallman's goofy conflation of OS permissions segmentation with aristocracies, and think the idea that the permissions model of the early 1980s is at all workable in the internet era is profoundly, stunningly naive. The XKCD argument misses the point entirely; if someone p0wns your browser, they p0wn your browser, but what we're talking about is allowing every VSCode extension and Docker ima…

> but what we're talking about is allowing every VSCode extension and Docker image someone installs to read your GMail.

I don't understand, this is already the status quo today. Any vscode extension can access your filesystem and connect to a socket, so it can just pipe your ~/.cache/mozilla to some server in russia, and even read the memory of any of your processes through /proc/$PID/maps. Ditto for any shell script you run, any build script for any software you clone from github before building it, unless you are running Qubes OS.

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

#429

Post by msbarnett »

jcelerier wrote: post #428
msbarnett wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I 100% disagree with Stallman's goofy conflation of OS permissions segmentation with aristocracies, and think the idea that the permissions model of the early 1980s is at all workable in the internet era is profoundly, stunningly naive. The XKCD argument misses the point entirely; if someone p0wns your browser, they p0wn your browser, but what we're talking about is allowing every VSCode extension and Docker ima…

> but what we're talking about is allowing every VSCode extension and Docker image someone installs to read your GMail. I don't understand, this is already the status quo today. Any vscode extension can access your filesystem and connect to a socket, so it can just pipe your ~/.cache/mozilla to some server in russia, and even read the memory of any of your processes through /proc/$PID/maps. Ditto for any shell script…

C’mon. Ability to read the cache is obviously a much much lower threat than the ability to read the browser processes’ memory – the browser doesn’t cache your GMail password.

Also let’s stop here and admire just how far you’ve shifted the goal posts: we’ve gone from “memory isolation isn’t a security measure it’s actually just for reliability” to “ok sure it’s obviously a security critical measure, but check out this boneheaded RMS rant and also what about the lower threat value data that gets cached, what about that. And do we even need security or can we just go back to the 1980s with our Amigas when everything was cool and advanced persistent threats didn’t exist, man”.

Pick a coherent point you’re trying to argue and some kind of intelligible threat model, at least. If we’re concerned about leaking filesystem data, there’s more aggressive sandboxing measures which several OSes employ, but they even more strongly rely on memory isolation, not less.

The point, which you seem to have conceded several posts ago, remains: Memory isolation is a security measure, not just or even primarily a reliability issue.

Also you don’t seem to understand what you’re trying to talk about, because:

> and even read the memory of any of your processes through /proc/$PID/maps

This requires root permissions (or for you to have explicitly changed /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope to a non-default value to allow processes to PTRACE_ATTACH to arbitrary non-child processes, which you shouldn’t do on a general purpose internet-facing machine unless you are a clinically insane person) for the obvious reason that this would be incredibly dangerous otherwise. Proving once again my entire point:

Memory isolation is a security measure.

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

#430

Post by bionade24 »

djrogers wrote: post #148
bionade24 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too. The problem aren't more ressource itensive features not possible before, but delivering a services we have for decades with way worse ressource usage because you can.

> There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....

Ripcord is the most advanced, SailSlack for SailfishOS and lots of CLI clients.
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