Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#451

Post by Rygian » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

lupire wrote: post #143

Rygian wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To where exactly: my devices. And if I don't want to buy my own devices, then to a cloud service that offers opaque storage of binary blobs with an API that my filesystem can abstract for me. So the topology is a mesh network of my devices, and perhaps optionally a few defined remote endpoints that the opaque blob storage service provides me, and that I enter as part of the config of my filesystem.

That sounds like Cloud Storage to me (Dropbox, Google Drive Backup/Restore/Sync/whatever it's called this year).

Cloud storage is the opposite of distributed.

With cloud storage, you must have one single fixed central location (often a third party) that contains the real data, many satellite locations with a partial replica of the data, and hit-or-miss mechanisms to notice changes in replicas and propagate them to the central location. If the central location is down there is no more synchronization. If the central location is not yours, they can shut you down anytime.

A distributed filesystem does away with the need for a fixed central storage by storing data across all locations with a configurable level of replication. A strong, consistent cascading of changes (eg a crdt semantic) brings all replicas in sync whenever connectivity allows. No third parties need to be involved, no single device is a point of failure.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#452

Post by Rygian » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #320

Rygian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Previously I used OVH online drive service, but it was EOL and pCloud is the replacement. So a vendor has the power to disrupt you whenever they feel like EOLing the service you depend on. I understand that's as good as it gets today, but it's not good enough. For me, the only acceptable level of impact is as follows: * vendor X sunsets their service by date D * before date D, I sign-up for a new account with vendo…

That's how it happened. OVH announced the EOL about a year before the system was shut down. pCloud is a replacement I choose, nothing to do with old OVH service.

Do you imply that the change was fully transparent to you, except for a config change?

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#453

Post by Rygian » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #136

Rygian wrote: post #3

It is good that these "water is wet" statements get written down so we can point humidity-skeptical people to them from time to time. The deeper problem is the sad state of affairs of distributed computing for the end user : * Application instances expect to be the only ones modifying the files that underlie the document being edited. Most of them simply bail out when the files get modified by another application. *…

I couldn't agree more. I've been working on CRDTs the last few years, and there's a huge opportunity here if we can reinvent the concept of the filesystem. Ideally, we'd replace files with CRDT-backed objects in the operating system. Then instead of fread / fwrite commands (which wastefully overwrite the entire file), applications could express semantic changes which get saved in a log. Those changes can be transpare…

I think we're very much in line. I made a wall of text done time ago to gather my thoughts:

https://personalfilesystem.org/

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#454

Post by mattnewport » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

sbf501 wrote: post #359

politelemon wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people use workstations. As described in the article, they are more powerful and many people need that power. You may have a specific, limited set of anecdotal data that you're using to ask that question rhetorically probably?

Yep. All I have is have anecdotal data. I believe desktops are on their way out. The trend has been happening for ~30 years. Even Android is working on virtual phone OS. The only applications I've encountered that need a workstation are: Audio Engineering, Video Editing, and 3D mock-up (prior to sending to render farms). All arts. What are some other examples? Everything I know about science and engineering (academic…

Game and VR development generally need powerful desktops both for programmers and content creators. Our entire team of (fully remote) VR developers have high end gaming desktops. If cloud workstations worked well they'd be interesting for us but none of them really support VR development at the moment.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#455

Post by imtringued » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:18 AM UTC

zasdffaa wrote: post #261

acdha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

We aren't talking about website loading speeds. This is about how quickly your mouse cursor moves in response to mouse movements and that latency needs to be 16ms or less.

Personally I can get latency down to 200ms over the internet into a remote datacenter with WebRTC. The challenge however in practice is that running a CPU without a GPU will eventually starve the CPU because it has to do intensive things like run a 1080p video at 60fps which aren't feasible on a CPU only machine. This CPU load will then slow down the video encoder and overall responsiveness (no, responsiveness doesn't mean a mobile layout here) of the remote desktop.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#456

Post by imtringued » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:28 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #427

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You simply get used to it. In many industry sectors (think CPU architects), multiple layers of inception is the norm (crossing multiple operating systems), and it is not strange for a keystroke to take 2 seconds, and for a menu to open and finish rendering in 10 seconds. This "experience" is probably the reason why I can still comfortably work over a DSL link with just network X (even though I still find NX much more…

You're a CPU architect and you wait 2 seconds for a keystroke? And you stay in that job? You must be one of the dumbest geniuses I have ever met. That's absolutely ludicrous that anyone would be expected to work that way.

There is a long queue of geniuses waiting for this genius to quit.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#457

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #310

zasdffaa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

This is just flat out wrong. Any seasoned gamer can feel the difference between a few tens of milliseconds. 300ms would render most video games unplayable. I see this claim a lot and it's making me want to build a website that gives you some common interactions (moving a mouse cursor, pressing a button) with adjustable latency so people can see just how big of an impact seemingly small amounts of lag have on how resp…

If you had 300ms latency, back when I played League of Legends "your ISP is having problems today and you cannot play". Anything above 70 is considered very bad

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#458

Post by pleb_nz » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 7:54 AM UTC

zasdffaa wrote: post #380

pleb_nz wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divide those figures by 10 might be closer to being accurate. 120ms is quite noticable. I know as I need to adjust latency out of Bluetooth headphones for recording. Recording with those latencies sounds like a disaster and is very very much noticable even with sounds let alone vision

While my post was wrong, in fairness the context was specifically about keyboards. Nothing to do with audio. I suppose I should have been explicit but the context was keyboard entry.

In my experience visual and feeling type things like typing have even stricter tolerances for timings is what I meant to say. If audio has a delay, visually noticing a delay will at least be as equal if not more noticable at a specific ms

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#459

Post by Rygian » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 8:11 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #131

Rygian wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My filesystem consists of [checks du -h . | tail -1] 189 GB. I don't think Syncthing (which I love) can cram 189 GB on my 64 GB phone. Yet I expect to have access to my filesystem from my phone. Synthing is a nice "pump-hose system" between reservoirs of data. What I was arguing above is to stop having separate reservoirs of data to begin with.

I use seafile (similar to syncthing) and it allows to browse your data libraries without requiring a local copy for these cases

The issue is not so much "can I browse a virtual file system" but more "why should I depend on one local file system sitting on a remote server, probably owned by a third party, as being the single source of truth for my own files."

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#460

Post by nikau » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 8:30 AM UTC

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #435

destroy-2A wrote: post #31

Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency goggles.

Does everyone here just suffer from exceptionally shitty IT departments? I've used Citrix for years and not experienced any of the chronic issues described here. Remember Citrix was developed in the 1990s... the days of Windows NT 3.5/4.0 [1] & Dial-Up connections and to be able to function well in these low bandwidth environments (we're talking kilobits here people, a 10 Mbps LAN was considered glorious at the time)…

Citrix performance can depend a lot on the apps - older win32 apps work really well as the object caching masked the latency on windows and buttons. Newer apps seem to somehow make the caching not very effective.