YouTube increases FreeBASIC performance (2019)

https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27927

by giancarlostoro • 8 months ago

178 46 8 months ago

TonyTrapp• 8 months ago

The same is true when running Winamp. When I was dabbling with FreeBASIC many years ago, my games performed better when I was listening to music. Same reason!

aa-jv4• 8 months ago

Windows Energy-saving timer heuristics

Another example of Windows' technical debt being there, low-hanging fruit-wise, to be cashed in by performance-oriented developers. Its interesting that Youtube changing the timer resolution propagates to other threads .. does this harken to darker days in the MSDOS era? Youtube, another Turbo button?

fragmede• 8 months ago

The best one, of course, is the one where Windows would install faster if you jiggled the mouse.

jaffa22• 8 months ago

I this related to when you are scrolling and selecting within a document, and you wiggle the mouse, it scrolls faster ? I always thought it was just a nice UI optimisation, but I could believe it's actually some accidental side-effect at play.

(like make a 20 page word doc, and start selecting from the first page and drag through - it wil go faster if you jiggle. same in excel and nearly every windows app, even windows explorer)

giancarlostoro2• 8 months ago

Makes me wonder how much of Windows is like Pokemon glitching, a community that never stops, even several generations ahead.

fhdkweig• 8 months ago

I was told a story by some hackers in the old multi-user mainframe days. They said that a good speed booster was to have the program open a terminal because it made the mainframe OS think it was a real-time user interactive program and give it more resources.

antonvs• 8 months ago

A performance issue related to this is more likely a shortcoming in the software experiencing this issue.

The setting in question is the minimum timer resolution. Changing this will only have an impact on applications that depend heavily on that resolution, i.e. it's not some sort of turbo button for general execution speed. In fact according to the docs, a higher resolution can "reduce overall system performance, because the thread scheduler switches tasks more often."

An application whose performance depends on the timer resolution should be setting that resolution itself, using the Win32 API function mentioned in the thread, timeBeginPeriod, which includes the following in its documentation:

For processes which call this function, Windows uses the lowest value (that is, highest resolution) requested by any process. For processes which have not called this function, Windows does not guarantee a higher resolution than the default system resolution.
Starting with Windows 11, if a window-owning process becomes fully occluded, minimized, or otherwise invisible or inaudible to the end user, Windows does not guarantee a higher resolution than the default system resolution. See SetProcessInformation for more information on this behavior.
Setting a higher resolution can improve the accuracy of time-out intervals in wait functions. However, it can also reduce overall system performance, because the thread scheduler switches tasks more often. High resolutions can also prevent the CPU power management system from entering power-saving modes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/...

aa-jv4• 8 months ago

Thats all well and good, but this part seems a bit .. uninformative, or at the very least, easily misunderstood by the harried developer:

For processes which have not called this function, Windows does not guarantee a higher resolution than the default system resolution.

There should at least be mention that changing this resolution can effect other processes.

Is this a bug? Its hard to see it as a feature.

user39393823• 8 months ago

Connections like this are fun and interesting but highlight what a complete junk pile our (extractive, spying, slow, bloated, eating power for no reason) stack is. we need a rewrite starting from the boot loader of almost every OS in use in the world

NetMageSCW• 8 months ago

That would just create a bunch of new OSs that are worthless. Don’t forget the real point is to run applications, not an OS.

user39393823• 8 months ago

No the new OS can run the same applications with about 80% less electricity, apps are exactly the point that’s correct which is why the bloat monster stack is ridiculous it’s not needed

rfl890• 8 months ago

The NT kernel is splendid. The OS is not.

user39393823• 8 months ago

For its context I agree but the whole chip arch is rotten so it’s doomed too unfortunately

mrozbarry• 8 months ago

I noticed in the thread that someone mentioned using `Sleep(16, 1)` gives a stable 60 fps, but I like to always drop a link to https://gafferongames.com/post/fix_your_timestep/ and decouple your game movement from your fps. It's a bit more math, but it is usually pretty smooth in my experience.

charcircuit• 8 months ago

That link is not right either since it sets now to the current time instead of the time the frame will be displayed. This means that things will be rendered at the wrong positions than where they should be.

In regards to achieving smoothness you'll need to have proper frame pacing and the article doesn't mention how to do that properly.

noobermin• 8 months ago

Windows man. While linux is cursed in many ways, not being able to just know your PC's performance profile just seems so backwards to me. It's one of those things (lack of control) I don't miss.

zozbot234• 8 months ago

Linux also does timer coalescing? I'm not sure there's any real difference wrt. this behavior.

Waterluvian• 8 months ago

So much that sucks about today’s world comes from people who push Pro Skub vs. Anti Skub attitudes, while being so ignorantly confident that their side is the right one.

0xcb02• 8 months ago

I was recently astonished when using speech recognition software on my computer finally made the computer silent. So when I use the speech recognition, my fan just stops. I investigated it and it does not stop, but the speech recognition software seems to slow down the fan to the minimal speed, even though the CPU cores are getting hotter and hotter. You never know these days what programs do.

simlevesque• 8 months ago

Is it a Mac ? I think Macs always do that when they're actively listening with the internal microphone.

0xcb02• 8 months ago

Yes, it's a Mac. An iMac, pretty old iMac. I did test it with Siri and that doesn't turn down the fan.

Zee2• 8 months ago

That is something that Macs do at the system level (if you were experiencing this on a Mac)

wiz21c• 8 months ago

IS FreeBaisc still a thing nowadays ? I understand it's surely less popular, but are there people using it on HN ?

giancarlostoro2• 8 months ago

Good question, I'm not even sure what I was looking up when I found that thread, I think I was curious about something else entirely, but as someone who learned to code with VB6 the link intrigued me, I mean come on, that thread title is just great.

I wanted FreeBASIC to have a RAD IDE back when I was still clinging to VB6 as it was being replaced by VB.NET. I hope someday Microsoft open sources bits and pieces of VB6.

stuaxo• 8 months ago

We're up to GWBasic, so I'd hope for QuickBasic in its various forms, next.

After that are the various visual basics.

For DOS we are up to 4, hopefully 5 is next which has interesting TUI apps like DOSSHELL as well as QBasic and EDIT and QuickHelp.

supercheetah• 8 months ago

Have you checked out Gambas[1]?

1. https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

zoeysmithe• 8 months ago

I imagine 99% of its use are people maintaining quickbasic legacy apps.

ryandrake2• 8 months ago

Certain browsers allow YouTube to set the internal resolution of the timer to a lower value

It's wild to me that browsers expose this kind of control over my system to third party developers. I think making the browser an "application platform" was overall a mistake. Call me crazy, but I just want a browser that fetches and displays web sites.

Bratmon2• 8 months ago

I don't quite get your objection here. Is it to the fact that browsers are commonly used to show video, or the fact that smoothly showing video requires changing certain power saving settings?

ryandrake2• 8 months ago

My objection is that merely visiting a website can invoke all kinds of unexpected things happening on my computer. As a web browser user, I don’t expect it to be modifying how timers work on my system, or accessing peripherals and radios, or programming my GPU or the memory of other processes, or my location, or writing to my filesystem, or basically anything else other than what is needed to draw text and images onto a browser window.

nmjohn• 8 months ago

It may also be interesting for people that browsers have a large list of domains they enable or disable certain behavior for a variety of reasons: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

ryuuchin• 8 months ago

The browser isn't exposing it to websites. It's simply due to the fact of playing media that it's lowering the minimum timer resolution on Windows. In the past it would also do this when just scrolling among other things if I remember correctly, I'm not sure if it still does this.

Firefox uses a different method that doesn't require lowering the minimum timer resolution.

Either way the global behavior of this is no longer true on modern Windows 10/11 machines (as of Windows 10 2004) as each process must now call timeBeginPeriod if it wants increased timer resolution: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/windows-timer-r...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/...

YouTube increases FreeBASIC performance (2019)

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