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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#191

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc »

tralarpa wrote: post #185
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #167

It seems many comments missed the point. The article is not about how bloated modern software is, how many useless features and programs are wasting CPU cycles for pointless jobs, etc. ( Yes, modern software is bloated, for this reason, I'm using the MATE desktop on a minimum Gentoo installation, but this is not what the article is about. ) It is describing how web browser, a piece of software with extremely high inh…

> The questions worth discussing are Interesting that you ask how to diagnose and manage the complexity, but not how to avoid it. Do we really need a more or less complete OS+VM (aka web browser) running on top of another OS (Windows etc.) to read e-mails?

Completely agree. I realized this perspective immediately after I made the post.

Original post updated!

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#192

Post by dzdt »

dsr_ wrote: post #57
brucedawson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused about your suggestion. I work on the Chrome web browser on the Windows platform. If we want to allocate memory we, ultimately, need to call VirtualAlloc. I could work on Chrome for Linux, but then this bug on Windows might never get found or fixed. I am satisfied with my choices, despite the occasional glitches.

They failed to distinguish between "I use the Chrome browser on Windows to get work done" and "I work at Google, making Chrome for Windows". Human languages, what are you going to do?

For what it's worth I also read it as "I use the Chrome browser on Windows to get work done" and only slowly figured out the correct interpretation as the debugging adventure got crazier and crazier.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#193

Post by jakeogh »

habosa wrote: post #46

I just kind of figured we'd stop having UI lag by now. I work on a 24 core workstation with 64GB of RAM and things lag all the time. Not slow to complete, like jittery key entry and non-responses. Haven't we figured out thread prioritization by now? Can't we make sure something draws 60 times per second while things are going on in the background? My Android Studio build should be totally isolated from my inbox. I kn…

I got annoyed enough to auto -STOP every tab but the one in the foreground (using surf [with or without tabbed] and a bunch of X glue), coupled with JS disabled by default is very nice. It's got bugs, but I'll add the X plumbing to my version of surf sometime soon: https://github.com/jakeogh/glide

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#194

Post by DanielBMarkham »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #167

It seems many comments missed the point. The article is not about how bloated modern software is, how many useless features and programs are wasting CPU cycles for pointless jobs, etc. ( Yes, modern software is bloated, for this reason, I'm using the MATE desktop on a minimum Gentoo installation, but this is not what the article is about. ) It is describing how web browser, a piece of software with extremely high inh…

I get what you're saying, but it seems you already have a place you want to go and are using the article to get there -- much like the other commenters.

While these things are important, to me the critical phrase in the article is this: ...It seems highly improbably that, as one of the most qualified people to diagnose this bug, I was the first to notice it...

My system hangs when typing text all of the time. Reading this article, this indicates to me that 1) It probably hangs for tens of millions of other people, and 2) Nobody either has the time or money to do anything about it.

That sucks. Additionally, it appears to be a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason).

You can look for potential answers as you point out. More importantly, however, is the fact that nobody is aware of the scope of these problems. Millions of hours lost, the situation getting worse, and there's nobody hearing the users scream and nobody (directly) responsible for fixing things. In my mind, figure those things out and then we can start talking about specific patterns of behavior that might limit such problems in the future.

tl;dr Who's responsible for fixing this and how would they ever know it needs fixing? Gotta have that in place before anything else.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#195

Post by raattgift »

brucedawson wrote: post #59
habosa wrote: post #46

I just kind of figured we'd stop having UI lag by now. I work on a 24 core workstation with 64GB of RAM and things lag all the time. Not slow to complete, like jittery key entry and non-responses. Haven't we figured out thread prioritization by now? Can't we make sure something draws 60 times per second while things are going on in the background? My Android Studio build should be totally isolated from my inbox. I kn…

I'll go into more details in part two, but part of the problem would have reliably disappeared if I had been running a single-core CPU. Locks are hard.

> Locks are hard.

Yes, especially when the OS does nothing to help a backing-off contender acquire a resource that is greedily dropped and contended by another thread.

> I'll go into more details in part two

Great! In anticipation of that, I have a couple questions:

> but part of the problem would have reliably disappeared if I had been running a single-core CPU

Single-core or single-thread? Does the atomic instruction switch to the other HyperThread generally?

Do you see the same symptoms if you have a sufficient number of other unrelated CPU-intensive threads trying to run that the OS will want to deschedule the aggressive contender thread(s) from time to time?

The ways to deal with this that come to mind are the aggressive contender thread(s) sleeping from time to time, or yielding in hopes the decision about waking up the thread recovers some fairness lost by the decision about which lock waiter win. Perhaps one could just put the lock's cache line on as equal a NUMA footing as it can (a flush, for instance) so the aggressive contender has a chance to lose a race. However, having to reason about cache coherency protocols (differing from vendor to vendor and even same-vendor model to model) seems like a huge headache that anyone would want to avoid if possible. Is a fix described in the long crbug discussion?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#196

Post by pantalaimon »

x3sphere wrote: post #101
bartread wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't meant to be an especially religious comment, but I regularly switch back and forth between OSX and Windows 10 and wanted to make mention of the differences. I also use Ubuntu fairly regularly but only over ssh so I'll discount it from this comparison. Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Window…

Ubuntu w/Gnome is possibly the worst offender. I actually like Gnome a lot but anytime I leave my PC on for more than a day the UI gets incredibly sluggish. Just moving windows around gets choppy and there is a annoying pause whenever I click the application launcher (happens even without the animation). I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that…

I just stayed with Mate with Compiz (Ubuntu Mate) and my desktop is still as snappy as it was during Gnome 2 days.

I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.

I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#197

Post by Frenchgeek »

EdiX wrote: post #157
x3sphere wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu w/Gnome is possibly the worst offender. I actually like Gnome a lot but anytime I leave my PC on for more than a day the UI gets incredibly sluggish. Just moving windows around gets choppy and there is a annoying pause whenever I click the application launcher (happens even without the animation). I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that…

You should try cinnamon. There's no accounting for taste, but after using gnome 3 for three years I tried cinnamon (version 3.6, older versions weren't good) and I found it better across the board.

Tried it with for my now very old netbooks (because 1024x600 is low-res now), kept it on my desktop machine because it's simple, out of the way and fast.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#198

Post by bennofs »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #143
speedplane wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the concerns in your comment are real, but they can be boiled down to one simple fact: Moore's law is dead. Our processors are now not advancing nearly as quickly as people can create solutions for them. Case in point - Virtual Reality, which has technically been on the market for years, but out of reach for most users. If processors are not improving, everything else slows down. Graphics, games, and the internet…

If we had an operating system where every system call used an async calling interface, the type of spinlock latency observed in this article would be greatly reduced. It wouldn’t bring Moore’s Law back but it would make the most of what CPU resource we have.

Wasn't the lock in the article kind of async? From my understanding, the problem was not the wait time on the lock alone, but that the lock is not fair: so even if you asynchrounously locked, someone else (in this case the WMI scan) can get the lock everytime before you get it so you are blocked a long time (you cannot continue with this particular operation until you get the lock, even in the async case).

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#199

Post by some_account »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #164
sadamznintern wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.9ghz in 2018!? What machine is this?

Intel Core-M? A SoC-like, high performance, low power mobile CPU. Performance per MHz ratio is high, allows reasonable performance with low clock frequency.

Yep it is. Also the computer don't have fans so it's dead quiet at all times. It's an Asus Zenbook ux305.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

#200

Post by blub »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #167

It seems many comments missed the point. The article is not about how bloated modern software is, how many useless features and programs are wasting CPU cycles for pointless jobs, etc. ( Yes, modern software is bloated, for this reason, I'm using the MATE desktop on a minimum Gentoo installation, but this is not what the article is about. ) It is describing how web browser, a piece of software with extremely high inh…

We could ask a lot of questions, but at the end of the day system complexity will increase the likelyhood of so-called "system accidents" for any type of system, not just SW.

One of the most effective measures to combat such issues is to... reduce the system's complexity. E.g. by not having another VM running on top of the OS just to read and write e-mail.

Since this won't happen any time soon due to various reasons, the only reasonable thing left to do for most of us is to grab some popcorn and watch how the software development world struggles to contain the mess we made and fail at it.

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