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When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

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Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#71

Post by yamtaddle »

throw10920 wrote: post #57
Topgamer7 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about cutting corners. It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer. That being said I would love to have less memory allocation on my devices when effectively idle too.

Most of this is false. Ripcord achieves near-feature-parity with the official Discord and Slack apps using cross-platform desktop technologies with a fraction of the resource usage with a single developer . Ripcord's very existence contradicts most of the claims you've made above.

You can also just look at how many developers it took to build similar programs, native and cross-platform, in, say, the 90s and early 00s. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of them had smaller teams for all platforms combined than Discord has for its single desktop client. Yet one would hope we've gotten more efficient at software development since then, and the entire excuse for using things like Electron is supposed to be that it saves a whole bunch of developer hours—but then you look at how tiny teams were on some of even the fairly-big programs back then, and all our "more-correct" processes and technologies start to look pretty damn suspect.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#72

Post by ShamelessC »

capableweb wrote: post #32
belltaco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; Isn't that for showing what game you're running as your status? If you turn that feature off it should stop doing that.

Couldn't you do that by just scanning `px aux` or even just `/proc` rather than running a tool that is meant for observing and control the execution of other processes? A simple name matching should be enough, rather than digging into the execution of the process itself.

You're aware that the majority of users are running Windows or Mac OS?

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#73

Post by 10000truths »

nightski wrote: post #64
yamtaddle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because a) people want high resolution, This cannot be any serious part of the reason, since literally playing 3D video games fullscreen at full resolution can use less power than Discord. [EDIT] For that matter, any streaming video platform. They're ~all extremely battery-efficient even when pushing 4k.

Video games have optimized rendering pipelines and assets. Discord is showing emojis, images that are 10MB+ each, and all kinds of user generated crap at high res that it doesn't have control over. Personally I'd prefer to go back to just text.

Of course they have control over it, it’s literally their own platform. There’s no reason that Discord can’t benefit from the same optimizations that video games use. If a AAA title can figure out how to render 100000+ polygons UV wrapped with several 4K resolution textures in the span of 16 ms, then a $15B valued company can certainly figure out to display emojis and large images without turning your notebook into a DIY stovetop.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#74

Post by speps »

deathanatos wrote: post #6

Interesting. I discovered just the other night that merely minimizing Discord nets me about a 20 FPS improvement in Factorio. (Even if Discord is otherwise off-screen, which it normally is, as Factorio is fullscreen, and there's no second monitor for me.)

So you were at 0 FPS and now at 20 FPS? Using FPS for performance without giving the before/after numbers is useless...

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#75

Post by foepys »

bob1029 wrote: post #38
miga wrote: post #4

There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one. Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these: * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; * using 99% CPU; * to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected; * Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it. * too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the lo…

>> blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear. I think HN may have solved one of my most annoying technology mysteries... Definitely taking discord out of automatic startup. Moving back to teamspeak or some other system is quickly becoming a thing for me. I used to run a TS3 server for years.

TeamSpeak 5 is currently in beta and attempts to bring a Discord-like experience to any TeamSpeak server.

TS3 already had a lot of features like file uploads, rich text chat, avatars, and much more, and as far as I know TS5 is mostly a reskin using the existing technology of TS3.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#76

Post by yamtaddle »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #68
yamtaddle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because a) people want high resolution, This cannot be any serious part of the reason, since literally playing 3D video games fullscreen at full resolution can use less power than Discord. [EDIT] For that matter, any streaming video platform. They're ~all extremely battery-efficient even when pushing 4k.

Video playback is low power primarily because GPUs (even embedded ones) have dedicated hardware for video decoding. Video chat requires also encoding video, which not all gpus provide hardware for. CPU encoding video is a very energy intensive task especially as the resolution increases.

A macbook with a built-in webcam doesn't provide robust and low-power hardware encoding for video that camera captures? I should see battery life plummet if I use Quicktime to record video through it, then... right? There shouldn't exist battery efficient screencast apps for these computers... right?

I don't think this excuse flies on anything made in the last 10 years, at least, except maybe trash-tier netbooks or something. Unless the software is so amateurish that it doesn't even try to negotiate a codec that suits the hardware it's running on, and just picks something evidently-poorly-supported no matter what.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#77

Post by furyofantares »

rubicon33 wrote: post #27
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/ . I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.

Agreed and I’d go a step further and say that this was inevitable with the advent of JavaScript. Humans are lazy (efficient?) and will always gravitate to the easiest tool for the job. If “the job” is just to make a functional chat app, it becomes wildly efficient to simply wrap your web app in electron. I’ve done it to an existing web app and it took less than a day to suddenly have “native” .dmg and .exe to distrib…

Alright so I gotta ask, now that two people are saying they yarn for the days of IRC. I thought maybe it was a different idiom I was missing, but searching for "idiom yarn for" doesn't get me anywhere. Just a typo/misspelling of "yearn"?

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#78

Post by capableweb »

ShamelessC wrote: post #72
capableweb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you do that by just scanning `px aux` or even just `/proc` rather than running a tool that is meant for observing and control the execution of other processes? A simple name matching should be enough, rather than digging into the execution of the process itself.

You're aware that the majority of users are running Windows or Mac OS?

Well, they have equivalent functionality I assume where you can get a list of process names that are currently running, without having to resort to using ptrace?

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#79

Post by semi-extrinsic »

robertlagrant wrote: post #50
sidewndr46 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a real question: what are Slack huddles supposed to do? I run the native client. While anyone can start a huddle with me, I never see any UI for a huddle. All I get is the audio coming across. To end the huddle I have to force stop Slack and relaunch it.

I really like them. No need to invite people to a meeting; just jump in. E.g. if you have an issue to diagnose as a group you can just stay on the line, and dip in and out where necessary.

In Teams you can just call the first person up and then add more people into the call. "Jane Doe is calling you from a group chat" or whatever it says. I'm surprised this is a new-ish feature in Slack?
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