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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

#261

Post by rocho »

polkadotted wrote: post #235
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, booting from a SSD is faster Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.

This is a blatant lie that needs to stop. I've been using linux exclusively on laptops for more than 10 years. The first 5 with the HP EliteBook like, currently with Lenovo X1 line. On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10. We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, whic…

I get 6-8 hours out of my Zenbook with ArchLinux. Nowhere near the touted 9 hours of the specs, or the 12+ of the Macbook.

My system is exceptionally lean. I run bspwm and the radios are always off except WiFi. Still, I feel like I could get a lot more from this laptop. I cannot (and I certainly wouldn't want to) install Windows on dual boot to make a comparison though.

What distribution do you use?

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

#262

Post by MR4D »

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 agree, and really appreciate your post. One thing I can't get over is what happens when everything is written in Javascript and runs in a browser? Clearly, we are not far from that now, which means the stack looks like this:

    Javascript code
    - - - - - - - - 
    Javascript interpreter
    - - - - - - - - 
    Browser (doing display things if not more)
    - - - - - - - - 
    OS
Running an app in a browser is cool, but the complexity is huge. Running a compiled app on the OS removes two layers of complexity from this situation!

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

#263

Post by brucedawson »

masklinn wrote: post #201
Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda; mainly that NtQueryVirtualMemory was super slow when scanning over CFG, which was bug fixed in the April 2018 Windows 10 update. It also uncovered a "bug" (performance weakness?) in v8 that they were able to fix so less CFG blocks were allocated. So kind of a win/win in the end, bugs fixed, world a slightly better place.

> It also uncovered a "bug" (performance weakness?) in v8 that they were able to fix so less CFG blocks were allocated. They implemented a freelist, it's a common workaround for problematic allocators, but has its own issues ( https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/analysis-of-openssl-fre... )

Normally a freelist is a tradeoff between memory and speed, but in this case there is essentially no tradeoff. If you look at the fix you will see that we don't maintain a freelist of memory in any traditional sense. We just retain a freelist of addresses. These addresses are then used as hints for where to allocate future CodeRange objects. If that address is gone, we'll go somewhere else.

Because the memory is fully freed and reallocated this also avoids security concerns.

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

#264

Post by mamcx »

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…

As I write in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17775303 the high reluctance in the industry to clean/refactor core tech is a huge cost generator. Eventually is necesary to accept that "move forward" is not the way.

Money is not a excuse, because browser/os/languages are already HUGE money losers.

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

#265

Post by brucedawson »

ndh2 wrote: post #110

Hi Bruce. This is a fantastic article, but I needed to read it twice to understand everything. Very dense in information, and sometimes the order of things make it hard to follow. Sometimes you tell us what you did (e. g. modified the virtual memory scanner) before telling us why (what CFG is, how it works), which was confusing. > It turns out that reproducing the slow scanning from the sampling data was quite easy.…

Thanks for the feedback.

The full investigation covered about two weeks and I was having trouble condensing the story into a single post. I appreciate having a particular problematic transition pointed out. Fixed.

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

#266

Post by brucedawson »

some_account wrote: post #154

I'm running Manjaro Linux with Deepin Desktop on a Dual core 0.9Ghz CPU with 8 GB of memory. Boot speed from off to login is less than 5 seconds. From hibernate it's instant. My girlfriend brought similar desktop to work and people with windows couldn't believe the machine was that fast. It runs circles around their new windows laptops with tons of memory and cpu cores. Firefox loads in a second. Kingsoft office also…

My Windows laptop boots incredibly quickly. I ruthlessly uninstall bloatware and, crucially, I have a fast SSD.

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

#267

Post by brucedawson »

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?

Fixed in the post, finally. Thanks.

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

#268

Post by waddlesplash »

renox wrote: post #223
feintruled wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back in the Amiga days, the processes for the GUI would be totally separate from the program logic. Add the pre-emptive multitasking and you would have GUI elements that would respond instantly always, even when the rest of your program was hung! Of course, the button callbacks wouldn't fire, but the button would appear to press, you could move windows, etc. Did a lot to reduce the perception of lag, whils…

The Amiga didn't have multiple address space so that's cheating.. I've never used an Amiga but BeOS was really much more responsive than either Linux or Windows but that was before SSD and multiple cores were available so maybe now the difference would be much less noticeable.. There is Haiku (in alpha or beta) but AFAIK it hasn't any native modern web browser..

Depends on what you mean by "modern", I guess? https://www.haiku-os.org/files/get-haiku/webkit.png

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

#269

Post by tntn »

zaarn wrote: post #122
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…

It's simple: Bad Engineering is cheaper. Just today on Patreon, I was going through a creators posts. After about 100 posts or so the page was barely usable. Animations took minutes to complete, loading more posts took 30 seconds and Firefox (Chrome quit after 80 posts when Linux' OOM decided that the fun was over) was struggling to repaint the view port, lots of white areas. At the end other applications were severe…

In the scenario described in the article, where was the bad engineering? It seems to me that the developers of each component (Chrome, OS, other processes) did things that, while perhaps not perfect, are quite reasonable, and definitely not exceptionally bad. Only together did they interact in this undesirable way.

This case isn't some web app that uses infinite memory; the contended resource is a lock.

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

#270

Post by tntn »

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 should have grown out of it by now, but I still dream of a Star Trek future, and I've developed a guideline (mostly in jest) for how I think about systems. It goes something like this: if the starship Enterprise turns out to run Linux, or windows, or the driver I work on, or Electron, or whatever I have in mind, and all the problems we see now show up on the monitors on the bridge, how would I feel about that?

Sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's not. I tend to wish that we could get a lot better at building systems, but that involves a number of difficult problems that people far smarter than I have been thinking about for far longer than I've been alive.

The future in my head doesn't have so many systems developed by accretion, but maybe that's how it has to be (for now).

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