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I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business softw

by tomc1985 5y ago

I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot. Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps, incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune game balance. There are numerous places where telemetry is completely inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted. (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I wish other operating systems could follow that example)

ashton314 5y ago
> freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)
- gtirloni 5y ago
  If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. It depends on which processes. If you include kernel threads (which show as processes), the number of processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core). I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part of the difference.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Not so sure about that, my last fresh install of Ubuntu Server (admittedly like 4-5 years ago now) had several cores hovering in the 20-30% range while idle and nothing was installed on the server yet. "Ooop, guess I'm going back to debian"
- dandotway 5y ago
  This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL: $ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 3.5 0.0 8944 332 ? Ssl 11:38 0:00 /init root 7 0.0 0.0 8944 228 tty1 Ss 11:38 0:00 /init dando 8 1.7 0.0 16804 3396 tty1 S 11:38 0:00 -bash dando 32 0.0 0.0 17392 1916 tty1 R 11:38 0:00 ps aux A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in Windows Task Manager.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Tip: If a process is a service-host, run `tasklist /svc` and that way you can actually know what's going on in each process.

ashton314 5y ago

> freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)

gtirloni 5y ago
If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.
- cesarb 5y ago
  > If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. It depends on which processes. If you include kernel threads (which show as processes), the number of processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core). I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part of the difference.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Not so sure about that, my last fresh install of Ubuntu Server (admittedly like 4-5 years ago now) had several cores hovering in the 20-30% range while idle and nothing was installed on the server yet. "Ooop, guess I'm going back to debian"
dandotway 5y ago
This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL: $ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 3.5 0.0 8944 332 ? Ssl 11:38 0:00 /init root 7 0.0 0.0 8944 228 tty1 Ss 11:38 0:00 /init dando 8 1.7 0.0 16804 3396 tty1 S 11:38 0:00 -bash dando 32 0.0 0.0 17392 1916 tty1 R 11:38 0:00 ps aux A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in Windows Task Manager.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Tip: If a process is a service-host, run `tasklist /svc` and that way you can actually know what's going on in each process.