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The computers are fast, but you don't know it

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Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#131

Post by [deleted] »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #76
Guest19023892 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…

Windows 10 or 11 with 4gb of RAM is a BAD idea. 8 gb is a minimum. Found that out several times.

[deleted]

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#132

Post by kossTKR »

jerf wrote: post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

I hope one day latency in general will be "back to normal".

I still remember how fast console based computing, an old gameboy or a 90's macintosh would be - click a button and stuff would show up instantly.

There was a tactility present with computers that's gone today.

Today everything feels sluggish - just writing this comment on my $3000 Macbook Pro and i can feel the latency, sometimes there's even small pauses. A little when i write stuff, a lot when i drag windows.

Hopefully the focus on 100hz+ screens in tech in general will put more focus on latency from click to screen print - now when resolution and interface graphics in general are close to biological limits.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#133

Post by jansommer »

dragontamer wrote: post #71

As a hobby, I still write Win32 programs (WTL framework). Its hilarious how quickly things work these days if you just used the 90s-era APIs. Its also fun to play with ControlSpy++ and see the dozens, maybe hundreds, of messages that your Win32 windows receive, and imagine all the function calls that occur in a short period of time (ie: moving your mouse cursor over a button and moving it around a bit).

Win32 is so really, really fast. And with Tiny C Compiler the program compiles and boots faster than the Win10 calculator app takes to start.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#134

Post by alpaca128 »

bbojan wrote: post #18
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #7

Hmm, interesting that single threaded C++ is 25% of Python exec time. It feels like C++ implementation might have area for improvement. My usual 1-to-1 translations result in C++ being 1-5% of Python exec time, even on combinatorial stuff.

I recently ported some very simple combinatorial code from Python to Rust. I was expecting around 100x speed up. I was surprised when the code ended running only 14 times faster.

Parts of Python are implemented in C. For example the standard for loop using `range`. So when comparing Python's performance with other languages using just one simple benchmark can lead to unexpected results depending on what the program does.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#135

Post by sergiotapia »

tiffanyh wrote: post #23

NIM NIM should be part of the conversation. Typically, people trade slower compute time for faster development time. With NIM, you don’t need to make that trade-off. It allows you to develop in a high-level but get C like performance. I’m surprise its not more widely used.

I've used Nim for about 2 years now. It's a wonderful language but it's desperately lacking a proper web framework and a proper ORM. If such a thing existed I would probably drop Elixir for Nim career-wise.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#136

Post by zozbot234 »

munificent wrote: post #68
jerf wrote: post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

I agree 100%. I wish every software engineer would spent at least a little time writing some programs in bare C and running them to get a feel for how fast a native executable can start up and run. It is breathtaking if you're used to running scripting languages and VMs. Related anecdote: My blog used to be written using Jekyll with Pygments for syntax highlighting. As the number of posts increased, it got closer and…

Please don't write programs in bare C. Use Go if you're looking for something very simple and fast-enough for most uses; it's even memory safe as long as you avoid shared-state concurrency.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#137

Post by antisthenes »

babypuncher wrote: post #111
Guest19023892 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…

Throw in more RAM and Windows 10 will likely feel snappier than Windows 7 did. It's probable the old Windows 7 install was 32-bit while your fresh install of 10 would have defaulted to 64-bit. That combined with 10's naturally higher memory requirements means the system has less overhead to work with.

> Throw in more RAM and Windows 10 will likely feel snappier than Windows 7 did.

It doesn't and never will. I've used them side by side for a few years and went back to W7 for productivity.

Interestingly enough, Lubuntu LXQt feels snappier than either system.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#138

Post by moonchild »

dragontamer wrote: post #60
forinti wrote: post #22

On a 3GHz CPU, one clock cycle is enough time for light to travel only 10cm. If you hold up a sign with, say, a multiplication, a CPU will produce the result before light reaches a person a few metres away.

> If you hold up a sign with, say, a multiplication, a CPU will produce the result before light reaches a person a few metres away. The latency on multiplication (register input to register output) is 5-clock ticks, and many computers are 4GHz or 5GHz these days. 5-clock cycles at 5GHz is 1ns, which is 30-centimeters of light travel. If we include L1 cache read and L1 cache write, IIRC its 4 clock cycles for read + 4…

> The latency on multiplication (register input to register output) is 5-clock ticks

3

https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#139

Post by jonnycomputer »

nequo wrote: post #53
Guest19023892 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…

I wonder if you'd have any more luck with that hardware putting Ubuntu Mate on it. For basic web browsing, it probably wouldn't matter much to your family whether it's running Windows or Linux.

I'm running Ubuntu Mate on a low-end brand-new laptop that couldn't handle the Windows OS it shipped with. Couldn't be happier.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#140

Post by p1esk »

bayindirh wrote: post #113
p1esk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely when 99.9% of the software you use in your daily life is user friendly Python, having to do anything in C/C++ is a complete exercise in frustration, it feels like going back a few decades in time

As a person who uses both languages for various needs, I disagree. Things which takes minutes in optimized C++ will probably take days in Python, even if I use the "accelerated" libraries for matrix operations and other math I implement in C++. Lastly, people think C++ is not user friendly. No, it certainly is. It needs being careful, yes, but a lot of things can be done in less lines then people expect.

Which “accelerated” libraries for matrix operations are you talking about?

Try writing a matmul operation in C++ and profile it against the same thing done in Numpy/Pytorch/TensorFlow/Jax. You’ll be surprised.

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