Most of my freezes on Ubuntu for me are the complete grind-to-a-halt kind, and they happen because I’ve run out of memory. Then I buy more memory.
24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
171–180 of 255 posts
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years, and if it doesn't, you can just change the CPU for a better one without having to throw all the other, perfectly good hardware away.
Frameworks are nice in theory but they still have a long way to go when it comes to heat, fan noise, and battery life based on what I've seen owners of them say.
Yeah, they are Intel in the end, which is tough on battery and heat. I hope that will get better if they switch to AMD.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same way about TV. I miss the ability to quickly flip through channels. When I was younger and my family had our first internet connection my dad said "One day internet webpages will load like changing channels on the TV - click click click. instant page loads" Today TV soo much slower and webpage are... well... you know.
So the prediction came true - webpages and tv channels load at the same speed.
Monkey's paw curls.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#174Tangent: Moving the mouse made Windows 95 faster https://www.pcgamer.com/this-theory-suggests-wiggling-the-mo...
Back in the early 00s my cousin had a modem that would only transfer data if either the mouse or the keyboard was in use.
Wow, I've never heard anyone else describe that.. but I had the same on Win95 (iirc) after messing about with the COM port setup too much. You could try to load a website and see there was no transmission going on whatsoever.. but then if you grabbed the mouse and moved it around you would instantly see data transfer happening again and the page would start to load.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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, e…
While I agree that incompetence and bad incentives are ever–present, and that all software can be optimized by application of a little elbow grease, I disagree that these are the only reasons. For example, properly displaying text now requires having a copy of at least the most important parts of the Unicode standard in memory. Things like knowing if a character occupies one, two, or many character cells are very imp…
You’ll get the exact same snappiness with xterm running on xserver (with no desktop or WM), despite all the Unicode and font rendering support.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#176I 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...
If all other explanations fail then even the least likeliest explanation is very likely true.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back then mainframes had specialized hardware to deal with them. Note: the other day I read ICL mainframes had specialized instructions to deal with pre-decimal pounds.
One of the IBM 1401 computers (1959) at the Computer History Museum has hardware support for pre-decimal pounds/shillings/pence, to perform arithmetic on these values and print them. Thus, the computer has three fundamental datatypes in hardware: arbitrary-length strings, arbitrary-length integers, and pounds/shillings/pence. Of course there were two competing standards for encoding pounds/shillings/pence, so the fro…
I didn't know the 1401 had that!
In the defense of your Mac, computers of the 1960's had terminal controllers for dealing with the communications. And 3270's were like web browsers - getting a form, sending the data back, getting another one - an excellent design for avoiding hardware interrupts ;-)
But yes. I've seen 370's with a good couple hundred 3278's connected and that thing was still quite snappy, even though the CPU in my watch can run rings around it. I guess even two VT330's would stress my current laptop if I could type on two keyboards fast enough ;-)
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own personal experience (recent x86 based MBPs and similar) is that macOS degrades quickly when CPU and IO get stressed, but Windows 10 and 11 become unresponsive with much smaller loads. Of the big three, Linux is the one that can take more processes while still being responsive. Even a lowly old i3 can encode videos with ffmpeg while you browse the web provided you start ffmpeg with a `nice -n 19`. On a Mac, it…
Linux UI actually becomes very unresponsive under load (on most distros) because the default kernel scheduler is tuned for throughput at the cost of responsiveness, instead of vice versa. Desktop distros switching to a more user-friendly scheduler, and loading a ‘small speaker’ EQ via Pulse on detecting internal speakers (= laptop) are two massive, low-hanging fruit improvements for Linux that just don’t seem to be d…
I guess running the heavy lifting with high niceness does the trick for me.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boo…
I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers. If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.
It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.
Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
"Antikythera Mechanisms" was the biggest player in 3rd century computing as I recall.
They seem to have sunk without a trace.