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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

#271

Post by magduf »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #227
abainbridge wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £…

It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of li…

This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it).

Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978.

And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.

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

#272

Post by jakeogh »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #234
jakeogh wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, this looks really nice. How are you sending SIGSTOP to background tabs? (assuming its not built in to glide; I didn't see it mentioned in the README)

I should have elaborated more on the "it's got bugs", it's been awhile since I worked on it, I just looked through the bash plumbing I was using and now I remember what needs to be done, the big issue is copy and paste, since the owner of the current selection needs to be woken up when you paste.

This is so ugly I hesitated to post it, but here: https://github.com/jakeogh/glidestop

In the case of glide, having tabbed take care of all of that would be much easier, or even better it would be integrated directly into a "tabbed like" process that acts more like a windowmanager and does not necessary have "tabs". I'm thinking of a more generalized version to tabbed with a --notabs switch or something.

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

#273

Post by nappy »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #227
abainbridge wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £…

It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of li…

A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.

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

#274

Post by selestify »

tntn wrote: post #270
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? Some…

We're still pretty early in computing history. It makes sense for things to be built by accretion the first time around.

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

#275

Post by selestify »

Koshkin wrote: post #233
tralarpa wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Likewise, one could ask if we need all this to read any sort of text - news, articles, etc.

Or even to just play music or stream videos.

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

#276

Post by dpkgreconfig »

rocho wrote: post #261
polkadotted wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you tried looking for offending processes with powertop?

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

#277

Post by CodeWriter23 »

bennofs wrote: post #198
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

In the article, they illustrate a poor design choice. Or probably more likely, a continuation of the programming practice utilized elsewhere in the kernel. That being, slap a lock on any resource contention. That practice is necessitated solely by the need to support a linear calling interface. Even if this particular issue were to be fixed through queuing instead of locking, the existence of locks elsewhere will still become an issue in a given use case.

My point is, by design, an operating system that has a fully async interface can dispense with locks altogether. Resource contention is then properly resolved through queuing. The OS can then strictly enforce a priority scheme on its various queues, preventing an opportunistic thread from dominating the system. Or enabling higher priority requests to be serviced first. But that decision is made intelligently, not as a result of optimizing to minimize context switching.

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

#278

Post by piercebot »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #248
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We've all been trained by web apps that stuttering, jaggy rendering and hangs are normal and expected. I've railed against web apps for a decade now, most to deaf ears. They are so broken, unperformant, unreliable that in a previous time they would have never released with problems like those. But now desktop apps have the same issues. And its not going back to where we were. So I guess we'll get used to it.

Jittery rendering, hangs, and high-latency are deal breakers in Virtual Reality. I think things will get better as a matter of necessity for VR and AR, and then "veterans" from the field will bring back "new ideas" about performance and user experience.

Or, if you prefer your optimism a bit more dystopian-flavored, some megacorp will come around with a walled garden whose user experience is just so good that users will flock to use it, and the rest of the industry will have to adapt to compete.

In either case, I don't think getting used to it is our only choice :)

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

#279

Post by oso2k »

speedplane wrote: post #102
oso2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More cores, more RAM, more cache, more concurrency will help create higher total throughput but usually also mean higher latency because of increased context switching, natural need for more resource locks, increased delay in searching/reading larger stores like cache & RAM, and, higher latency penalties when there are cache misses and/or applications that require write-through policies. Things like faster clocks (wh…

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…

This has nothing to do with Moore's Law or improving processors directly. If anything, this is a software optimization problem. Half of what I mentioned was locks and schedulers, which are directly software problems. Layer on the fact that a helloworld application in most languages and frameworks is 100s of KB to dozens of MBs, and you have really, really, unoptimized software. 30 years ago, lots of software was written in Assembly and some C. But software has gotten fatter and slower at a much much faster rate than hardware has gotten faster/more parallel since the industry introduced ILP, caches, multi-stage instruction pipelines, etc. with the Pentium/5x86 class microcomputers & processors. Most people never learn to write multi-processing, multi-threaded, multi-programming, event-driven, decentralized or distributed applications. The model that browsers and most languages & frameworks provide is usually inherently sequential and single processing.

If web developers never learn to write multi-processing, multi-threaded, multi-programming, event-driven, decentralized or distributed applications the web will forever look like it looks today.

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

#280

Post by mrguyorama »

piercebot wrote: post #278
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've all been trained by web apps that stuttering, jaggy rendering and hangs are normal and expected. I've railed against web apps for a decade now, most to deaf ears. They are so broken, unperformant, unreliable that in a previous time they would have never released with problems like those. But now desktop apps have the same issues. And its not going back to where we were. So I guess we'll get used to it.

Jittery rendering, hangs, and high-latency are deal breakers in Virtual Reality. I think things will get better as a matter of necessity for VR and AR, and then "veterans" from the field will bring back "new ideas" about performance and user experience. Or, if you prefer your optimism a bit more dystopian-flavored, some megacorp will come around with a walled garden whose user experience is just so good that users wi…

Except in VR's case they just ask you to purchase a $1000 set of kit and if you experience stuttering just shrug and suggest upgrades
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