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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#61

Post by _Algernon_ »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #40
Baeocystin wrote: post #29

I hold out forlorn hope that someday my modern workstation will achieve the responsiveness and fast boot times of my Commodore 128. Not joking in the least.

Can still be done if all you want is a command-line to come up and be responsive. Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.

>Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.

Sure, but a modern computer also has orders of magnitude more processing power than devices that only ran a command line. There is no reason that we cant have both, except incompetence and/or bad economic incentives.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#62

Post by WalterBright »

spacechild1 wrote: post #58
WalterBright wrote: post #44

I use Thunderbird for my email. Its behavior shows it is a multithreaded program. But often, the mouse and keyboard will freeze and it becomes unresponsive for several seconds. This is indicative of suboptimal partitioning of the tasks into threads. The highest priority thread should be responding to user input. Heck, back in the 1970s, I designed and built a single board computer that was to be a glass tty. There wa…

For me the UI hangs whenever Thunderbird downloads new messages. It seems as if they are doing network I/O on the UI thread - which can't be true...

I learned not to touch the keyboard when TB was downloading new messages and running filters. Otherwise it would randomly corrupt the message file, and I'd lose it all. Yes, I filed a bug report with TB. No, they never found the problem.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#63

Post by akiselev »

einpoklum wrote: post #56
logicallee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a long break over the holiday and am thinking of putting a software project out. Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) without overhead, and count cycles so that most tasks are done within a single screen refresh? I can't make the rest of users' systems more responsive but I could make my own software as fast and efficient as possible…

> Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) Maybe. Premature optimization is said to be the root of all evil... But at the same time - the assumption that everything will be easier and faster in Python rather than Rust or C++ is often invalid. Sure, for smaller scripts it almost always is like that, but once your app grows, this may stop being t…

> Maybe. Premature optimization is said to be the root of all evil...

The full quote, because it always gets butchered to "premature optimization is the root of all evil":

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#64

Post by andrewstuart »

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos.

The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad.

Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows.

Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever.

Also, the registry - I think the worst idea in all computing. Prior to the registry you plopped a windows application in a location and configured it with an INI file. After the registry the entire operating system and all applications turned into one big ball of chewing gum, glue and hair dredged out of the shower drain.

How can Windows have got it so wrong?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#66

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hinkley wrote: post #26
eloff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality you never have a finely tuned load that uses all the resources all of the time. Processors spend a lot of time waiting for memory, so hyperthreading allows for better utilization of compute. It’s rare to have a workload that benefits from turning it off, and in those cases it’s usually because the hyperthread is hurting the cache hit rate enough to offset the gains.

Both threads are waiting on the same memory pipeline. The actual performance has always lagged behind the theory

If one thread has to hit main memory but the other one can get what it needs from L1 cache they aren't competing for the same resources.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#67

Post by dekhn »

WalterBright wrote: post #44

I use Thunderbird for my email. Its behavior shows it is a multithreaded program. But often, the mouse and keyboard will freeze and it becomes unresponsive for several seconds. This is indicative of suboptimal partitioning of the tasks into threads. The highest priority thread should be responding to user input. Heck, back in the 1970s, I designed and built a single board computer that was to be a glass tty. There wa…

even by mid-80s, if you used the naive serial routines built into the Apple IIe you couldn't do 1200bps- 300bps worked. Professional terminal programs used interrupt and buffers to capture incoming bytes while the screen scrolled (https://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews/apple2/ssc?pli...). At least that's what the author of ProTERM told me when I was a kid and I asked how it worked. It sounded pretty exotic at the time but now I work with low-level hardware... $5 chip that can do 2Mbps over serial.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#68

Post by kevmo314 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #64

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows. Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever. Also,…

Did they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#69

Post by formerly_proven »

NobodyNada wrote: post #39

In the follow-up blog post ( https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/what-is-windows... ) he uses a sampler to try to find the bottleneck by looking at CPU instructions, but concludes: > But the main thing I always realize when using this technique is that modern CPUs are weird and confusing. Because CPUs are massively out-of-order and super-scalar it is not at all clear what it means for a sampling interrupt to…

Sounds like the work of Agner Fog.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#70

Post by andrewstuart »

kevmo314 wrote: post #68
andrewstuart wrote: post #64

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows. Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever. Also,…

Did they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.

Can I ask what model and how much RAM?
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