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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

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

#371

Post by zlynx »

martyvis wrote: post #217

For my own amusement, when ever I get a new OS build on my machine, I'd open up a task manager and watch CPU load just by wiggling the mouse a lot or maybe simply pressing page up and down. I'm pretty sure it's always pretty easy to generate 25% CPU doing very little. Another thing would be just opening a local file from within a running application and wondering why multiple seconds and hence billions of CPU cycles…

That used to be true back when the CPU did all of the GUI rendering. But now most all of it is offloaded to the GPU. Any GPU that can render Quake 3 Arena at 120 FPS (and that's ALL of them even Intel IGPs) can wiggle a window around very easily.

Not sure about file opens. Simple applications like GVIM don't seem to have seconds of delay for me, but I know what you mean with things like spreadsheet or word processor files. I guess it is all of the unzipping and XML processing.

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

#373

Post by astrobe_ »

captainmuon wrote: post #342
titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

Could it be that we are doing the web browser wrong? I think large parts of chrome actually belong into the OS. The network parts, the drawing library (skia), the crypto implementation, the window and tab management, and so on. The javascript engine could be factored out, too, so more apps could benefit from it (without bundling a whole frickin Chromium). Video and audio would be deferred to DirectShow, Quartz, VLC,…

No, the web browser is all-righty. It has become the universal VM, so it's only natural that it is as big and slow to compile as an OS.

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

#374

Post by cerved »

SyneRyder wrote: post #245
ShinTakuya wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide, but I take your point otherwise. A pro tip with 7z is to use the two pane interface to extract and not dragging files to Explorer. The latter option extracts the files to a temp directory before copying them whereas the former extracts directly to the destination. The Windows file systems are pretty cruddy in general though…

> I mean the trackpad issue is generally down to the manufacturer and the drivers they provide... Was just wondering this myself. I tried a Surface Laptop this week, and its trackpad has everything I love from the 2012-era Mac trackpads. A satisfyingly snappy physical mouse click, gestures & acceleration, and a perfect size. (I can't stand Force Touch on the new MacBook Pro, and I don't like their new giant trackpads…

No complaints on the sp4 trackpad here

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

#375

Post by kuschku »

taw55 wrote: post #147
jonathanstrange wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Linux for my daily work for more than ten years now and develop for MacOS since around 2000, and I honestly cannot confirm this. If you have a fast and well-tuned machine, the sluggishness of modern applications might not be so notable, but it surely is there, and then there are also many usability issues of desktop software on Linux. Not to speak of browser-based applications, which mostly have unusable us…

Good luck on improving the situation as long as you have people running around who consider this all fine and normal. https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-f...

If you think Java or Ruby is bad, don’t even try looking at the JS ecosystem.

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

#376

Post by msla »

captainmuon wrote: post #342
titzer wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I work for Google on Chrome. A Chrome build is truly a computational load to be reckoned with. Without the distributed build, a from-scratch build of Chrome will take at least 30 minutes on a Macbook Pro--maybe an hour(!). TBH I don't remember toughing out a full build without resorting to goma. Even on a hefty workstation, a full build is a go-for-lunch kind of interruption. It will absolutely own a…

Could it be that we are doing the web browser wrong? I think large parts of chrome actually belong into the OS. The network parts, the drawing library (skia), the crypto implementation, the window and tab management, and so on. The javascript engine could be factored out, too, so more apps could benefit from it (without bundling a whole frickin Chromium). Video and audio would be deferred to DirectShow, Quartz, VLC,…

I'd be wary of moving the crypto into the OS, because OS upgrades are few and far between. Browsers are easier to upgrade, as we know from the rather aggressive auto-upgrade cycles of Chrome and Firefox, whereas if you have bad and/or now-known-to-be-insecure crypto in the OS, well, you're stuck with it for the foreseeable future. People are still running Windows XP.

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

#377

Post by msla »

gizmo wrote: post #296
zeusk wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have both. It's okay if a fully optimized release mode binary takes a bit longer to compile, but compiling a few million lines of code for a debug build shouldn't take more than a second or two. > You can have both. Pretty bold claim, without proof.

It's not difficult to spit out machine code at a high pace. TCC is one example given by the grandparent, but it's certainly not the only fast compiler out there. Languages like Turbo Pascal were designed for rapid single-pass compilation, way back in the 80s. A million lines of code represents an AST with a few million nodes in it, which compiles to a binary of a few megabytes. To do this we have computers with a doz…

Tell me, how do you do mutual recursion in a single-pass define-before-use compiler?

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

#378

Post by swiley »

digi_owl wrote: post #291
swiley wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about GNU/Linux is that the you can almost completely avoid all of the "desktop applications." I only ever start X when I need Firefox or mupdf. Everything else is a nice lightweight TTY app that I run in tmux. My 1.3 GHz celleron netbook is incredibly responsive set up this way.

Expect Firefox to demand a potent GPU just to load soon enough, thanks to GTK3...

Isn't the current version of firefox GTK3? I run it on my laptop with just the EFI framebufer and while it's /the/ most sluggish app installed it's still usable.

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

#379

Post by zlynx »

krylon wrote: post #168
jonathanstrange wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Linux for my daily work for more than ten years now and develop for MacOS since around 2000, and I honestly cannot confirm this. If you have a fast and well-tuned machine, the sluggishness of modern applications might not be so notable, but it surely is there, and then there are also many usability issues of desktop software on Linux. Not to speak of browser-based applications, which mostly have unusable us…

> I no longer use Mail.app but remember it as a particularly bad example. Huh. I used to think that my Mac Mini was just too puny for my huge mailboxes. I now use Evolution on openSUSE running on a Ryzen 1700 with an nVME SSD, and it still feels kind of slow-ish. So maybe that program is in need of some loving optimization, too (would not surprise me if it did), or my mailboxes are just unreasonably big (would not su…

That's just Evolution. It's a big, complicated turd that uses a thread pool with no priorities. So you can sit there waiting to read a message while it is blocked checking your other folders. Also it's keyboard shortcuts are stupid.

Thunderbird is a lot better.

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

#380

Post by treehau5 »

wbl wrote: post #318
treehau5 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did we get here? Well, C++ and its stupid O(n^2) compilation complexity [...] Wasn't large compilation time a driving force behind coming up with Go? Is a garbage-collected language not suitable for a web browser? I am just curious because I absolutely love writing Go

GC performance is a trade between throughput and pause time. There are tricks you could play with each tab in its own heap which is entirely discarded on page change, but I think it would take something expensive like Azure to really work.

> GC performance is a trade between throughput and pause time.

Go has sub-millisecond GC pauses, and even at that minimizes the need to do stop-the-world pauses (previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12821586) I think it would be a very interesting exercise to give a crack at it. If anyone is interested, let me know.

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