24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-move-my-mouse/

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

214 253 4 years ago

randomascii.wordpress.com

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

Moving the mouse is the worst case scenario for a deep multicore processor because (1) it is a single-threaded latency sensitive task, (2) there are 23 other cores that can grab a lock and prevent the 1 core that matters from doing its job in a timely manner.

hulitu• 4 years ago

So the 23 cores are there only to starve the 24th ? Sounds almost human.

baq• 4 years ago

Where are the mouse coprocessor equipped computers?

bluescrn• 4 years ago

Hardware sprites (and presumably interrupts) made the Amiga mouse pointer move fluidly and responsively even when the CPU was busy. No complex graphics pipelines or laggy LCD screens to add further latency back then either.

HPsquared• 4 years ago

Optical mice themselves can have quite a complicated processor onboard. Luckily the image processing isn't done on the CPU/GPU.

I wonder if anyone ever sold a "software optical mouse".

formerly_proven3• 4 years ago

Mouse cursors are mostly handled in hardware. GPUs composit the cursor during scanout, so all the OS has to do is calculate the new coordinates of the cursor and tell the GPU about them.

chrsig• 4 years ago

With regard to latency sensitivity, with so many cores available, a single core could be dedicated to processing mouse input. Of course, if there's a lock in the way that's held, that's still a problem.

astrange• 4 years ago

Or if it needs code that’s paged out or all cores are thermal limited or the GPU hung. CPU time usually isn’t the limiting factor.

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

For a modern system like Wayland or WDM, the display compositor gets rectangles of pixels from the applications, copies those into a big rectangle it sends to the rasterizer. Just before it does that, it draws on a mouse cursor. It also has to communicate with the applications about what image to draw so you have to deal with multiple threads no matter what.

(Unless you go back to the late 8-bit era where the cursor might be a just a hardware sprite that can be moved around by writing a few bytes.)

malfist• 4 years ago

Hyperthreads aren't real CPU cores, claiming that your 48 hyperthreads were "only" 50% utilized means all the real cores under the hood are fully utilized.

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

Hyperthreads aren't real CPU cores

I can't think of a good principled reason to say SMT cores aren't "real".

I'm assuming the answer isn't "because they share some computing stuff". What I think you'd call "real" cores also share resources like L2/L3 caches, sometimes DMA engines, etc.

And IIRC, each Intel SMT (hyper-thread) unit has its on instruction pointer and (non-SIMD?) register set.

toast0• 4 years ago

And IIRC, each Intel SMT (hyper-thread) unit has its on instruction pointer and (non-SIMD?) register set.

I believe the SMTs share the register rename storage, which I'd say is the register set more than the 'architectural registers'

But I'd say the reason they're not real is because they don't increase the maximum instructions per clock. With many loads, they do increase the average instructions per clock, but they don't let you do anymore work if you've got a fully tuned load that uses all the computing resources.

bakugo• 4 years ago

I can't think of a good principled reason to say SMT cores aren't "real".

It really depends on your definition of "real", yes you can treat them like "real" independent cores but that's not ideal for performance because under the hood they're not actually independent. Your operating system is aware of this and will often avoid scheduling two tasks onto the same physical core unless it has to. If you have 20 logical cores (10 physical ones with hyperthreading) and 10 tasks to execute, the OS scheduler will usually allocate one task to each physical core and leave the other logical core idle.

fmajid3• 4 years ago

On AMD, yes, but Intel Hyperthreading is not real SMT.

323• 4 years ago

4 wheel drive is also not real, because under the hood they share the same engine.

leephillips• 4 years ago

Only on those ancient internal combustion computers.

ilyt2• 4 years ago

Nope, all depends on type of load.

HT is an opimization to context switching but if your code running on both utilizes different parts of core (say one loads some memory while others does some math), you can get speedup that's above savings from not having to context switch.

But early on it wasn't really that well optimized so you might've had OS put 2 threads on 2/1 HT/core while other core sits idle

salawat2• 4 years ago

If I recall, this is mainly caused by the shift to USB as the connector du jour. Since it's a poll centric protocol, under heavy load, system responsiveness decays.

Back in the days of P/S 2, where input was interrupt driven, the background tasks would be interrupted by input coming in, ensuring the user could move the mouse around. Now whether they could get the outcome of a click to register is a different story. The click would, but there'd be no guarantee the click handler would execute before background processing resumed, because it'd be considered an event that'd get scheduled after whatever is currently starving the CPU thread.

dezgeg2• 4 years ago

Sure, on the wire USB is a polling protocol. But the polling is done by the host controller hardware, which will raise an interrupt just like PS/2 whenever the device responds to the polling as having data available.

neonbeige2• 4 years ago

The polling by the host controller is still limited to happening once every bInterval period as specified by the device, which for mouse/keyboard will be at least a few milliseconds, v.s. the old school PS2 style mice which would send hardware interrupts straight to the processor.

taeric• 4 years ago

The article is about a bug in process destruction, if I'm not mistaken. The mouse bit is a bit of an aside. More of an obvious symptom that something is wrong.

Not that interrupt based input processing didn't have some advantages. Just this shouldn't be one of them.

spogbiper• 4 years ago

As I understand it, the polling is done by the USB controller, not the operating system or anything happening in the system's CPU.

the__alchemist• 4 years ago

On the MCU (device) side, you can command the poll in a data-received interrupt. Does it not work that way on the PC side? Ie, you never have to really block on the MCU.

neonbeige2• 4 years ago

It's the same for the host controller hardware, it exposes different interrupts which the host controller driver can make use of so you don't have to busy-wait. The details depend on the host controller interface the hardware provides though.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

Tangent: Moving the mouse made Windows 95 faster

https://www.pcgamer.com/this-theory-suggests-wiggling-the-mo...

actionfromafar• 4 years ago

So it wasn't just my imagination that installers became faster when doing that...

ArmandTanzarian• 4 years ago

At 40 this behavior is ingrained in me and influences my behavior while using a computer to this day.

cassianoleal• 4 years ago

Back in the early 00s my cousin had a modem that would only transfer data if either the mouse or the keyboard was in use.

randac• 4 years ago

Wow, I've never heard anyone else describe that.. but I had the same on Win95 (iirc) after messing about with the COM port setup too much. You could try to load a website and see there was no transmission going on whatsoever.. but then if you grabbed the mouse and moved it around you would instantly see data transfer happening again and the page would start to load.

paultopia• 4 years ago

Ask me about how my couple-generations-ago ipad pro (just before the M1) sometimes randomly freezes when I try to scroll a pdf...

Baeocystin• 4 years ago

I hold out forlorn hope that someday my modern workstation will achieve the responsiveness and fast boot times of my Commodore 128. Not joking in the least.

logicallee• 4 years ago

I have a long break over the holiday and am thinking of putting a software project out.

Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) without overhead, and count cycles so that most tasks are done within a single screen refresh?

I can't make the rest of users' systems more responsive but I could make my own software as fast and efficient as possible.

The other alternatives are Python, which would make it easier to ship large features but would come with a large overhead (full interpreter) since it's an interpreted language.

shadowofneptune• 4 years ago

Cycle-counting is useless on modern workstations, since different processor are used in each. I don't see how the choice of language is significant either, as long as it meets your goals for responsiveness. Goal could be instead to limit latency where possible (measuring time from click to completed action is easy with a framework), or communicate to the user when an action will take a noticable amount of time.

AlexanderDhoore• 4 years ago

I'd do it in C, but that's just me. If this is a one-person project you can hold you code to a high standard. Clean standard C11 with all warnings turned on (-Wall Wextra Wpendantic Wconversion). Write unit tests. Run them with valgrand/sanitizers. Use clang-format. Build with multiple compilers (GCC/clang/MSVC). ...

EDIT Not many hackers on hackernews apparently.

amluto• 4 years ago

This is usually the wrong approach. Make sure you don’t do computations that block the UI, avoid accidentally quadratic behavior, and make sure you process UI events promptly. You can do this is pretty much any language, with minor caveats:

Some languages (e.g. Haskell) make it easy to write code that does more computation than intended. If you use one of these languages, make sure you know what you’re doing.

If you use a language with a truly horrible GC, you might experience excessively long pauses. Similarly, if you produce too much garbage, you might have issues.

If you use a language that can’t multithread properly (sigh, Python), moving tasks off thread is a mess.

Otherwise, one can write perfectly responsive software in just about any language.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust)

Maybe. Premature optimization is said to be the root of all evil...

But at the same time - the assumption that everything will be easier and faster in Python rather than Rust or C++ is often invalid. Sure, for smaller scripts it almost always is like that, but once your app grows, this may stop being the case.

Start with a language that's convenient for you and with which you can release an initial version. Then get an understanding how it behaves in terms of performance, and draw your conclusions.

as fast and efficient as possible.

Responsiveness is not the same as speed or efficiency. Of course it's important to be fast and efficient, but it is even more important to not just start crunching numbers and ignore the user and the rest of the system.

Do your hard lifting asynchronously and have a thread attending to user input and your UI (or even different threads for these two tasks). And this is easier said than done!

Also remember you'll have to try and work around delays and slowdowns due to other apps and the (non-realtime) OS. Specifically, you might have to play with thread scheduling and I/O priority (although - that's usually the user's rather than the app's job).

Additional notes:

* Also consider C++; it has some advantages and disadvantages relative to Rust (which I obviously will not get into), but it has seen a whole lot of progress in recent years, in particular w.r.t. the ease of doing many things which used to be painful.

* If you think of Rust as low-level, then your head must be in the clouds... :-P

mixmastamyk3• 4 years ago

Can still be done if all you want is a command-line to come up and be responsive.

Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.

ianlevesque• 4 years ago

Those things don't preclude responsiveness though. Modern software is sitting on top of mountains of inefficiencies and legacy baggage. This was found just months ago https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-wo... "A bit of security" is also quite apt, since there's huge room for improvement there too. I wish I could find a way to get paid to improve all this. Currently I'm only doing it for mobile apps.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

web, email, images and a bit of security are not the reason windows UI is laggy as fuck

_Algernon_• 4 years ago

Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.

Sure, but a modern computer also has orders of magnitude more processing power than devices that only ran a command line. There is no reason that we cant have both, except incompetence and/or bad economic incentives.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

The average user doesn't even boot the computer. It's just always on and wakes pretty much instantly.

phaedrus• 4 years ago

I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boot being slow (either intentionally or unintentionally - e.g. hardware or software race conditions, device drivers not actually making sure the device is ready yet, etc.) that there was "no point."

kabdib• 4 years ago

I've seen code that

(a) issued an async read

(b) did some computation

... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers.

If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.

user_7832• 4 years ago

On a tangential note, that reminds me of my mom's former (Asus) laptop - it advertised booting up in 2 seconds, and actually was pretty close! I didn't think much beyond "must be a fast SSD with skipping the bios screen"... until while debugging some storage issues I realized it was an HDD XD

I guess when manufacturers want to do something well they really can integrate everything.

nemacol• 4 years ago

I feel the same way about TV. I miss the ability to quickly flip through channels.

When I was younger and my family had our first internet connection my dad said "One day internet webpages will load like changing channels on the TV - click click click. instant page loads"

Today TV soo much slower and webpage are... well... you know.

ant6n• 4 years ago

So the prediction came true - webpages and tv channels load at the same speed.

MayeulC• 4 years ago

I played around with the `dillo` web browser a couple years ago. It doesn't support javascript, but it was oh so amazing to experience it as you describe.

anikom154• 4 years ago

Not a C64 user, but I did use Apples, Ataris, and IBMs. Booting to BASIC or a cartridge was fast. Booting to a floppy not as much.

Reading a tape? That took several minutes.

dijit• 4 years ago

The boot was fast on the c64. Essentially instant.

It just dumped you into a prompt though, and loading any program was really quite painfully slow.

neurostimulant• 4 years ago

Every parts of modern computer system introduce unavoidable latency: monitor has ~50ms latency, bluetooth keyboard has ~70ms latency. Even the desktop compositor has latency (~10ms). Then you have another latency in the application layer, typically the slow text rendering stacks like GDI or Cairo (~50ms). It's basically impossible to escape them in a modern system these days.

Pxtl• 4 years ago

From reading it over the root cause was in a massively-multiprocess application. In general this is the usual problem of "on windows use threads not processes for ephemeral parallel tasks" right?

kevingadd• 4 years ago

There are also just some workloads that will saturate things. If you hit the mmap infrastructure hard enough on Windows you can saturate the kernel and your mouse cursor will stop moving, I managed to do it with a custom key/value store written in C# once I spun up enough threads hitting mapped files at once.

I would assume that on win10/11 (this was a while ago) it is harder to saturate a modern machine, though, especially if you lower the i/o priority of your process.

Oxidation2• 4 years ago

Ctrl-F in a 10MB PDF in Adobe DC lags when typing while (I guess) it builds the search suggestion index. On an i9 11th gen with over 20000 CPUmark, and 64 GB of RAM. Madness.

jmrm• 4 years ago

The only reason I would use Adobe over SumatraPDF is the need to open a PDF that use JavaScript, have 3D content inside, or has to be digitally signed.

Probably SumatraPDF is a lot faster because can't do all of those fancy things, but for reading a document and look for some keywords it's absolutely fantastic, and I don't need something better in 99% of the time.

NobodyNada2• 4 years ago

In the follow-up blog post (https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/what-is-windows...) he uses a sampler to try to find the bottleneck by looking at CPU instructions, but concludes:

But the main thing I always realize when using this technique is that modern CPUs are weird and confusing. Because CPUs are massively out-of-order and super-scalar it is not at all clear what it means for a sampling interrupt to hit “on” a particular instruction. If an instruction is particularly expensive then samples are more likely to hit “near there” but I’m sure where “near there” actually is:
If there are three instructions executing simultaneously when the interrupt fires then which one “gets the blame”?
If a load instruction misses in the cache and forces the CPU to wait then will the samples show up on the load instruction, or on the first use of the data? Both seem to happen.
If a branch is mispredicted then will the samples show up on the branch instruction or on the branch target?
What’s going on with the expensive cmp instruction on line 24 of the spreadsheet?
If anyone has a good model for what happens to the CPU pipelines when a sampling interrupt happens I would appreciate that. Ideally that would explain the relationship between clusters of samples and expensive instructions.

I have a distinct memory of reading a blog post probably 5-ish years ago where someone did just that. The author started with some microbenchmarks of very tight loops, and used some sort of profiler/perf counter tool that measured hit counts for each instruction of the loop. Then, they went into a deep dive into analyzing the instruction throughputs and latencies and dependency chains to demonstrate how bottlenecks at the CPU level manifested as clusters of samples, and how to use this information to optimize the loop.

Does anybody else remember this post, and possibly where I can find it? I’ve been in a couple situations where it would have been tremendously helpful, but I just haven’t been able to dig it up.

formerly_proven3• 4 years ago

Sounds like the work of Agner Fog.

turol• 4 years ago

It was Travis Downs: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/08/20/interrupts.htm...

NobodyNada2• 4 years ago

That’s it, thank you so much!

WalterBright4• 4 years ago

I use Thunderbird for my email. Its behavior shows it is a multithreaded program.

But often, the mouse and keyboard will freeze and it becomes unresponsive for several seconds. This is indicative of suboptimal partitioning of the tasks into threads. The highest priority thread should be responding to user input.

Heck, back in the 1970s, I designed and built a single board computer that was to be a glass tty. There was no way to get that 6800 uP to update the screen fast enough to keep up with characters arriving at 9600 baud.

The solution was, whenever the user hit a key, to abandon updating the screen and process the character. Once that process was complete, and there were no more keys in the input, the screen updating was restarted.

It worked out great. You simply never noticed this was happening, and you always got crisp response.

I did the same thing for the MicroEmacs text editor on the IBM PC. If I hadn't, the editor would lose input and/or have noticeable lags refreshing the screen.

P.S. The importance of not losing input was necessitated by using ttys to transfer files across the phone lines and serial ports. You also couldn't touch type if the tty lost key input.

P.P.S. The Chrome browser that I use also has problems with freezing on keyboard input.

spacechild1• 4 years ago

For me the UI hangs whenever Thunderbird downloads new messages. It seems as if they are doing network I/O on the UI thread - which can't be true...

WalterBright4• 4 years ago

I learned not to touch the keyboard when TB was downloading new messages and running filters. Otherwise it would randomly corrupt the message file, and I'd lose it all. Yes, I filed a bug report with TB. No, they never found the problem.

MichaelZuo2• 4 years ago

If all other explanations fail then even the least likeliest explanation is very likely true.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

I stopped using thunderbird for this reason

dekhn• 4 years ago

even by mid-80s, if you used the naive serial routines built into the Apple IIe you couldn't do 1200bps- 300bps worked. Professional terminal programs used interrupt and buffers to capture incoming bytes while the screen scrolled (https://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews/apple2/ssc?pli...). At least that's what the author of ProTERM told me when I was a kid and I asked how it worked. It sounded pretty exotic at the time but now I work with low-level hardware... $5 chip that can do 2Mbps over serial.

WalterBright4• 4 years ago

Yup, ISRs are the solution for 6800 and 6502 chips.

Data I/O's LogicPak (powered by a 6502) used polling, and would now and then lose data because of that. I advised the engineer working on it to just write an ISR. Months went by, while he was convinced he could make the polling work.

Finally, the manager dropped by and asked if I could just fix it. In a couple hours had it fixed with an ISR. No more problems.

nix232• 4 years ago

I can crash Linux(all tested distros >5 for at leat 3 years) and FreeBSD reliable with Thunderbird, it's a terrible application and a statement for GUI-oss-applications....pure shame....

Edit: and no, not with root or a "wheel"-User

redeeman• 4 years ago

please provide a step by step guide on how to do this

BenjiWiebe• 4 years ago

Works fine for me, for the last 10+ years. Fedora and Thunderbird.

deterministic• 4 years ago

It just shows that Thunderbird has room for improvement when it comes to how it uses multi-threading. You always want the UI thread to be non-blocking and react instantly when a user does something. Most games (for example) do this really well.

andrewstuart6• 4 years ago

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos.

The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad.

Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows.

Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever.

Also, the registry - I think the worst idea in all computing. Prior to the registry you plopped a windows application in a location and configured it with an INI file. After the registry the entire operating system and all applications turned into one big ball of chewing gum, glue and hair dredged out of the shower drain.

How can Windows have got it so wrong?

kevmo3142• 4 years ago

Did they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.

andrewstuart6• 4 years ago

Can I ask what model and how much RAM?

fmajid3• 4 years ago

The GUI is still essentially single-threaded. Only BeOS with its fully parallel UI had it right.

yamtaddle2• 4 years ago

Switching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not just when using FF. Switching from Chrome to Safari got rid of almost all the rest, and also made my battery life match Apple's claims.

[EDIT] And when I do still run into trouble, it's almost always Electron chat apps. Slack, Teams, and Discord. All terrible at being respectful of system resources. Closing the program and restarting it usually temporarily fixes the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

rbanffy9• 4 years ago

My own personal experience (recent x86 based MBPs and similar) is that macOS degrades quickly when CPU and IO get stressed, but Windows 10 and 11 become unresponsive with much smaller loads. Of the big three, Linux is the one that can take more processes while still being responsive.

Even a lowly old i3 can encode videos with ffmpeg while you browse the web provided you start ffmpeg with a `nice -n 19`. On a Mac, it seems to be ignored.

Waterluvian4• 4 years ago

A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users).

Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds my entire system to a crawl when everything is software rendered. YouTube basically kills my computer.

When I go with Mac or Windows, the main feature is that they have designers to make more than a Potemkin UI, and they care about the end to end UX. No, “oh go complain to some other vendor.”

Ubuntu is very very impressive for free. I certainly acknowledge how great that is, and how important that is to the ecosystem.

Anyways, sorry about the rant. I’m calming down.

anikom154• 4 years ago

How long ago did you switch to Mac OS? This sounds like an argument from 2004, not 2022.

andrewstuart6• 4 years ago

When the Intel Mac arrived, so maybe 14 years ago or more?

Are you saying Windows has fixed all these problems?

The registry is still there.

I do actually have some Windows machines I use sometimes and recall thinking "still the same" but I can't say that as a hard core user, so I'd be interested to hear if Windows is now a sleek, reliable multitasker that instantly kills dead applications. Nothing will make me OK with the registry and the general mess of Windows though - it's like a house someone hasn't properly cleaned for 40 yeaes.

ChoGGi2• 4 years ago

Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows.

My windows install is from 201*, it was an upgrade from win7, and switched from an i7 to a ryzen. I do clean out the registry/startup/task scheduler on occasion.

Maursault• 4 years ago

My windows install is from 201*

The early 3rd century was the best era for Microsoft with Windows Severan.

spixy• 4 years ago

2015, for a year or so on insider builds, upgrated i5 to ryzen, migrated primary partition from SATA SSD to M.2 SSD

no registry cleaning, only cleaning temp files with built-in app in Settings

Dah00n• 4 years ago

I have been where you are, posting the same thing, but I don't believe it is true today. Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. I also don't reformat, at most i reset Windows or applications but it has been years. I agree with the rest but in everyday use the registry is not a problem in Windows.

The difference to me is that I as a power user might be able to fix it myself in Linux but by only using the tools normal users know of I must say I cannot recognize that this is a weak point in Windows today. Clicking the X to close an app and getting stuck with a dead app is much worse in, say, Debian than in Windows.

With that said.. I don't use Windows where I have a choice but that is mainly for philosophical reasons these days. Mac I don't touch. I feel it is the worst of both camps.

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10.

Have you seen anything in Linux that you can't kill with "kill -9"?

nailer3• 4 years ago

I think all desktop OSs have it wrong. Allowing full APIs to backgrounded apps and no CPU reservation for control apps will ultimately end desktop computing - we’ll create on iPads because they work.

rbanffy9• 4 years ago

I'm writing this on an old i3 and it feels perfectly fine. It would probably take days to compile a large project like Chrome or LibreOffice, but, as long as I run the make under a nice, I can continue using the computer and the only sign something big is happening will be the CPU fan kicking in.

Chinjut• 4 years ago

Don't MacOS and Unixes have the equivalent of registry hell with a million configuration files hidden away in /etc/ or /usr/ or wherever, and then having to check where environment variables are set and so on? Ideally, almost all of a program's configuration settings would be stored in the same folder as the program, readily discoverable, and you could just pick these things up and move them easily, but in practice, it seems to be a pain everywhere.

_piif• 4 years ago

NixOS and Guix come close to this with a central spot for declaring the entire system state, including program configuration and env vars. Now there is still the $HOME/.config mess, which home-manager[0] tries to tackle.

[0] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

andrewstuart6• 4 years ago

The registry is uniquely crap because it puts all the configuration for everything into some single store - I don't know what devilish format lies beneath it, then it stores everything as binary keys. Things are not separated strictly by application so you end up with a giant pile of intermingled goo.

In Linux, no doubt there's alot to get your head around, but I've never found things to be a giant pile of spaghetti. The challenge Linux has is there's a bajillion ways to do things so you have to be pretty experienced to feel confident crawling around the tunnels and ventilation ducts.

thewebcount• 4 years ago

From a typical user’s perspective, macOS puts all Preferences files into ~<username>/Library/Application Support/<app bundle name> or ~<username>/Library/Preferences/<app bundle name>, and they are standard Plist files readable by both command line and GUI tools that ship with the system, so easily editable and human-readable. From a power-user’s perspective, it is a Unix system and that part of it is the usual mess of Unix config files. I’m definitely a power user but rarely have any need to touch a Unix config file on my macOS systems.

ufmace• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't think it's meaningfully worse than the MacOS or Linux system of configs in text files with various types of special formats all over the place, unless of course it's some kind of binary format that can only be modified with a special CLI program.

seanw444• 4 years ago

ahem ahem gconf ahem ahem

IshKebab• 4 years ago

I agree. Windows is basically fine these days. It's even better than Mac and Linux in a big way from a desktop stability point of view because it has the Ctrl-alt-delete interface which works reliably and lets you kill the offending program.

Linux has various useless options like sysreq shortcuts that you can't remember and kill random processes, and I don't think Mac has anything, though to be honest I don't recall ever bringing a Mac to its knees so much that I couldn't open a terminal and run `top`.

faebi• 4 years ago

My windows literally doesn‘t boot today due to a bluescreen. No idea why or how that happened. Had it a few times in life before, but never on macos.

w1nst0nsm1th2• 4 years ago

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos.

The raison I just ditched Fedora for ubuntu...

The raison I ditched MacOS for Windows is that MacOS is slowly but surely becoming a magnified version of iOS... One day you will have to jailbreak if you want administrator rights on your ~~personal computer~~ Macbook.

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

This is also why I ditched Windows, about 15 year ago. But honestly, I get more ui freezes and beach balls today with Monterey than I do with Win 10. Windows has been getting better while MacOS has been slipping.

jorvi2• 4 years ago

I wrote a long comment on my phone telling you how this is simply untrue.

During the typing of the comment, Safari locked up and then hard-crashed, losing my comment.

If that happens on something as tightly-controlled as iOS, how many bugs and crashes do you think macOS and it’s apps experience?

The main difference between macOS and Windows or Linux, I’d say, is that bugs on macOS are more submarine. Windows also has much stronger recovery mechanisms, to the point where a GPU crash barely phases it. A GPU crash on macOS will hard-reboot the system and possibly show you a ‘:-)’.

Merad• 4 years ago

This is a very outdated take on windows.

I’m not sure what “multitasking is bad” means, but I do a heck of a lot of multitasking on windows every day with resource intensive developer tools with no problem, and have been doing so for over a decade.

Apps can be killed via task manager without doing anything special. You might run into an occasional rare bug where explorer freezes so you can’t open task manager, but I can’t recall the last time it happened to me (and you can’t tell me with a straight face the Linux or MacOS are completely free from wild edge case bugs of that sort).

I used to religiously reformat and reinstall windows. It’s been completely unnecessary since at least Windows 7. My personal desktop ran from 2014 to 2021 on the same install, including a Win7 -> Win10 upgrade.

You certainly may not like the registry, but it’s hard to make a compelling argument that it’s been a source of problems since Win7. To be honest I think all of the registry problems I can recall seeing in the last decade were caused by people being sucked in by “registry cleaner” scamware/malware apps claiming to fix non-existent problems.

winrid4• 4 years ago

Try to sort by name in task manager and wait as it locks up for seconds.

drittich• 4 years ago

Same experience here. I work my machine hard. It runs 24x7, hosts many sites, databases, Plex, and I do some pretty heavy development work on it daily. It pretty much "just works". The last time I had to routinely reinstall Windows was Windows XP. Ever since Windows 7 driver stability is significantly better. Despite all the bad press, the Windows 11 upgrade was smooth for me. Yes, the OS has some annoying features, but all in all it's been remarkably stable.

dang• 4 years ago

Discussed at the time:

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733829 - July 2017 (499 comments)

jwilk• 4 years ago

You may also like "24-core CPU and I can’t type an email" from 2018:

• part 1: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/24-core-cpu-and... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17780127 (313 comments)

• part 2: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/08/22/24-core-cpu-and... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575 (99 comments)

w1nst0nsm1th2• 4 years ago

24 cores CPU and the guy is still in a wordpress domain name ?

dm3192• 4 years ago

Sounds like Windows needs this 200 line kernel patch that sped things up for linux in 2010 [1]

"The patch being talked about is designed to automatically create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop interactivity under system strain."

"Tests done by Mike show the maximum latency dropping by over ten times and the average latency of the desktop by about 60 times."

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux_2637_video

tinglymintyfrsh• 4 years ago

Thermal throttling, dirty fans, poor process isolation and scheduling, and so forth.

yazzku• 4 years ago

I fell off the chair when I read the headline. I get that software runs insanely fast on modern hardware and that often, the naive solution works with acceptable performance. But boy -- can we not set the bar as low as "barely responsive"? If your thing doesn't run on a Raspberry PI, it's probably garbage.

Razengan• 4 years ago

Why don’t computer architectures have a separate CPU dedicated to the OS/GUI?

Oxidation2• 4 years ago

This will still not help when the UI CPU is busy-waiting for the application CPU to generate and send the contents of the menu after you click.

And if you can asynchronise separate CPUs, you can do it in separate threads on one CPU.

datavirtue• 4 years ago

Windows?

psychphysic• 4 years ago

The trouble is no matter how much fast RAM, how much of a beast of your GPU is. How many threads your CPU has.

The UX is as hangy as the laggiest component.

That means if the Windows programmers decided that it needs to wait for every HDD to spin up to show you the contents of your start menu you're gonna have a bad time.

keybored• 4 years ago

Most of my freezes on Ubuntu for me are the complete grind-to-a-halt kind, and they happen because I’ve run out of memory. Then I buy more memory.

g8oz• 4 years ago

On the other hand I just installed Chrome Flex OS on a 2011 HP laptop with 4 GB of memory and am in shock at how responsive it is.

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

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