Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

randomascii.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 255 posts

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

#81

Post by dezgeg »

neonbeige wrote: post #48
dezgeg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, on the wire USB is a polling protocol. But the polling is done by the host controller hardware, which will raise an interrupt just like PS/2 whenever the device responds to the polling as having data available.

The polling by the host controller is still limited to happening once every bInterval period as specified by the device, which for mouse/keyboard will be at least a few milliseconds, v.s. the old school PS2 style mice which would send hardware interrupts straight to the processor.

Yes, but that sort of 'delay' will be there all the time, with no relation to the system being loaded (like the top commenter is claiming).

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

#82

Post by fmajid »

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.

The GUI is still essentially single-threaded. Only BeOS with its fully parallel UI had it right.

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

#83

Post by db48x »

Rusky wrote: post #23
PaulHoule wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a modern system like Wayland or WDM, the display compositor gets rectangles of pixels from the applications, copies those into a big rectangle it sends to the rasterizer. Just before it does that, it draws on a mouse cursor. It also has to communicate with the applications about what image to draw so you have to deal with multiple threads no matter what. (Unless you go back to the late 8-bit era where the cursor…

I believe the mouse cursor is still often a hardware sprite today.

Almost 100% guaranteed, but it is still possible for the OS to be delayed in sending it the coordinates. Of course that means that the OS is badly written.

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

#84

Post by the8472 »

salawat wrote: post #60
the8472 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly basic functionality. Windows and wlroots-based compositors have it at least. I'm reasonably certain that other major compositors have it too.

Did you check? I tell my QA people all the time: If you come to me with "I think" or "I believe", it sounds like you've got some reading to do.

I didn't write "I think" or "I believe".

If you want to know my epistemic status: I know about windows based on observable surface behavior and bugs related to accelerated cursors, but I haven't looked at the source. I know about wlroots because I saw the pull requests related to that and a flag to disable it in sway. The last statement regarding other platforms was an educated guess based on gfx card history: accelerated overlays are an ancient feature present in a lot of hardware, not some newfangled niche feature.

And I'm not one of your QA people.

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

#85

Post by ab-dm »

kevmo314 wrote: post #77
andrewstuart wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what model and how much RAM?

2019 13" MBP, 16GB. Pretty much anything I do will spin up the fan now. Compiling an app uses so much battery that I get less than an hour of battery life. I've resorted to remote development only, a la Chromebook. My previous laptop was a similar Lenovo X1 Carbon with Debian and wow do I miss it, but I don't have too much of a choice since I do mobile app development :(

Yeah, the 2019 MBPs were absolute abominations. I spent 5k AUD on a fully kitted out MBP and performance wise it’s one of the worst computers I’ve ever owned.

I swore that would be the last Apple computer I ever bought, but then they released the M1s… and they are very good.

Would recommend getting an M1 if at all possible. There’s still time to ask Santa for one.

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

#86

Post by fmajid »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #12
malfist wrote: post #5

Hyperthreads aren't real CPU cores, claiming that your 48 hyperthreads were "only" 50% utilized means all the real cores under the hood are fully utilized.

> Hyperthreads aren't real CPU cores I can't think of a good principled reason to say SMT cores aren't "real". I'm assuming the answer isn't "because they share some computing stuff". What I think you'd call "real" cores also share resources like L2/L3 caches, sometimes DMA engines, etc. And IIRC, each Intel SMT (hyper-thread) unit has its on instruction pointer and (non-SIMD?) register set.

On AMD, yes, but Intel Hyperthreading is not real SMT.

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

#87

Post by szundi »

shadowofneptune wrote: post #35
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…

Cycle-counting is useless on modern workstations, since different processor are used in each. I don't see how the choice of language is significant either, as long as it meets your goals for responsiveness. Goal could be instead to limit latency where possible (measuring time from click to completed action is easy with a framework), or communicate to the user when an action will take a noticable amount of time.

Agreed. The 2 choke points you optimize in algo returns the loss on choosing an otherwise better lang/environment for productivity.

Sometimes not though, like startup times, but there is not so many use cases that this counts, like 1password starts slower with each release.

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

#88

Post by Maursault »

ChoGGi wrote: post #74
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,…

> Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. My windows install is from 201*, it was an upgrade from win7, and switched from an i7 to a ryzen. I do clean out the registry/startup/task scheduler on occasion.

> My windows install is from 201*

The early 3rd century was the best era for Microsoft with Windows Severan.

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

#89

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

Switching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not just when using FF. Switching from Chrome to Safari got rid of almost all the rest, and also made my battery life match Apple's claims.

[EDIT] And when I do still run into trouble, it's almost always Electron chat apps. Slack, Teams, and Discord. All terrible at being respectful of system resources. Closing the program and restarting it usually temporarily fixes the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

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

#90

Post by jiggawatts »

WalterBright wrote: post #62
spacechild1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I stopped using Thunderbird a long time ago because it had a “feature” that would erase all of your email if it detected that your profile was corrupt…

… but it has a habit of corrupting profile files on shutdown.

Post reply on HN