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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)

#181

Post by Merad »

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,…

This is a very outdated take on windows.

I’m not sure what “multitasking is bad” means, but I do a heck of a lot of multitasking on windows every day with resource intensive developer tools with no problem, and have been doing so for over a decade.

Apps can be killed via task manager without doing anything special. You might run into an occasional rare bug where explorer freezes so you can’t open task manager, but I can’t recall the last time it happened to me (and you can’t tell me with a straight face the Linux or MacOS are completely free from wild edge case bugs of that sort).

I used to religiously reformat and reinstall windows. It’s been completely unnecessary since at least Windows 7. My personal desktop ran from 2014 to 2021 on the same install, including a Win7 -> Win10 upgrade.

You certainly may not like the registry, but it’s hard to make a compelling argument that it’s been a source of problems since Win7. To be honest I think all of the registry problems I can recall seeing in the last decade were caused by people being sucked in by “registry cleaner” scamware/malware apps claiming to fix non-existent problems.

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

#182

Post by db48x »

yamtaddle wrote: post #109
db48x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By these standards, the only well-written operating systems I've ever seen are BeOS and QNX/Photon. Probably iOS (at least, older versions of it) deserves to be on the list, despite mouse use being atypical. Which... yeah, that actually might be true.

iOS is the odd one out, because user input has first priority. IIRC, it cannot even do network I/O if you are holding your finger on the screen; all interrupts except those from the touchscreen are disabled for the duration.

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

#183

Post by jve »

andrewstuart wrote: post #76
anikom15 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago did you switch to Mac OS? This sounds like an argument from 2004, not 2022.

When the Intel Mac arrived, so maybe 14 years ago or more? Are you saying Windows has fixed all these problems? The registry is still there. I do actually have some Windows machines I use sometimes and recall thinking "still the same" but I can't say that as a hard core user, so I'd be interested to hear if Windows is now a sleek, reliable multitasker that instantly kills dead applications. Nothing will make me OK wi…

The rants go both ways. Others see value with the registry (ideologically), others more like you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32275078

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

#184

Post by aaronmdjones »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123
Dah00n wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been where you are, posting the same thing, but I don't believe it is true today. Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. I also don't reformat, at most i reset Windows or applications but it has been years. I agree with the rest but in everyday use the registry is not a problem in Windows. The difference to me is that I as a power user might be ab…

> Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. Have you seen anything in Linux that you can't kill with "kill -9"?

On Linux, processes that are stuck in D state (waiting on I/O) cannot be signaled. More specifically, the signal will be queued until the task exits that state. This includes signal 9.

The process may well never exit that state, for example if the I/O it's waiting for is actually over a networked filesystem and the NIC is misbehaving.

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

#185

Post by vondur »

Waterluvian wrote: post #105
kevmo314 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users). Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds…

I've since switched to using AMD graphics on my linux machine. Been running from a RX-580->5700XT->6800XT. It's been pretty good while using Fedora.

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

#186

Post by jacquesm »

dijit wrote: post #141
anikom15 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a C64 user, but I did use Apples, Ataris, and IBMs. Booting to BASIC or a cartridge was fast. Booting to a floppy not as much. Reading a tape? That took several minutes.

The boot was fast on the c64. Essentially instant. It just dumped you into a prompt though, and loading any program was really quite painfully slow.

It could be just as fast if the bios on a PC did absolutely nothing other than initialize the motherboard and a small basic interpreter.

A modern bios goes through more cycles during the boot phase of a typical machine than a C64 would see in its entire lifetime.

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

#187

Post by redeeman »

nix23 wrote: post #153
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…

I can crash Linux(all tested distros >5 for at leat 3 years) and FreeBSD reliable with Thunderbird, it's a terrible application and a statement for GUI-oss-applications....pure shame.... Edit: and no, not with root or a "wheel"-User

please provide a step by step guide on how to do this

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

#188

Post by nailer »

rbanffy wrote: post #103
nailer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all desktop OSs have it wrong. Allowing full APIs to backgrounded apps and no CPU reservation for control apps will ultimately end desktop computing - we’ll create on iPads because they work.

I'm writing this on an old i3 and it feels perfectly fine. It would probably take days to compile a large project like Chrome or LibreOffice, but, as long as I run the make under a nice, I can continue using the computer and the only sign something big is happening will be the CPU fan kicking in.

> as long as I run the make under a nice

Regular users don't understand CPU quotas. It should be done by default. The current behavior on Windows/Mac/Linux of allowing a program to make the machine uncontrollable is poor.

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

#189

Post by nijave »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #164
yamtaddle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.

Afaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days.

A website could just run in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.

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

#190

Post by wil421 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #179
kabdib wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI

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