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> I always cringe a bit when people insist they need 6 cores “so they can have discord and Spotify open while they game”. I mean, they're not wrong. I have Dis

> I always cringe a bit when people insist they need 6 cores “so they can have discord and Spotify open while they game”. I mean, they're not wrong. I have Discord sitting open at the login screen and it's burning 10% of a core. Run a few Electron apps and your core2duo suddenly becomes a core1uno. > Playing a video and writing a document Using what? VLC + notepad, or Chrome + YouTube + Google Docs? There's a huge difference. Discord gets a core, Spotify gets a core, Chrome with a few webapps open gets a few cores. That leaves 1 or 2 for a game if you're lucky. God forbid you also try to stream to Twitch. I'll cut the rant short here. You're right though; you should cringe if they insist on 6 cores, instead of 8 or more. Bloated software is the problem. The worst part is that efficient alternatives exist (Discord -> Ripcord, Spotify -> spotify-tui) but they're against ToS and can get you banned from both services. From what I hear Discord is a lot more likely to ban you. I've not heard of any Spotify bans. But as a user, even if you know the problem, your only choices are to risk an account ban, or buy an "overpowered" CPU to run your chat client. EDIT: Am I wrong? If you're skeptical, go find a Core 2 Duo and try watching a YouTube video while you're in a Discord call, and let me know how it goes. Those are the kinds of apps people use these days, like it or not. Don't shoot the messenger.

paulmd 4y ago
> I mean, they're not wrong. I have Discord sitting open at the login screen and it's burning 10% of a core. Run a few Electron apps and your core2duo suddenly becomes a core1uno. That is what I said about “people look at the measurement at the desktop and freak out about single-digit utilization without even realizing their processor is sitting in the lowest frequency state”. Is your processor even boosting all its cores when that 10% measurement is taken? In my experience usually it is not. Maybe different for Zen2/Zen3 but cpu measurement gets very complicated in general for those architectures since it can move between boost states so fast - it can boost so agilely that you can end up with garbage numbers because it’s moving between boost states faster than the task manager can enumerate the threads. It can move between boost states between the time you take the frequency measurement and the time you start enumerating the cpu load. This was a whole thing a couple years ago when people started looking at Zen2 and it turns out most third-party tools can’t handle this and only Ryzen Master gives you an accurate picture of what it’s doing. In general it is such a small amount of cpu that it’s not worth caring about. Also, typically while you game you’d have the overlay up and not the actual UI and that’s even faster - showing the login screen is likely slower than actually in game. Load up a game and the cpu will be loaded up harder and will stay boosted and then take your measurement of discord. People who are casually making observations about how intensive discord are never do that, it’s just “I see it using 6% at the desktop” [with the processor in the idle state rendering a full ui instead of just the overlay].
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  I ran a quick `while true {}` in the background. It used 7B cycles per second (twice the clock speed for some reason?), while Discord used about 700M. Discord does drop lower if I minimize the window. But still, thousands of context switches per second, while completely logged out. I have no idea what it could be doing. You're right that I'm probably not benchmarking rigorously enough. But people don't care about any of this stuff. They care about "my FPS gets lower when Discord is open, pls fix". And they don't want to micromanage CPU usage either. Make sure you minimize Discord after starting the call, make sure you close that gmail tab during the game then open it back up when you're done so you don't miss notifications? No thanks. I'd rather just pay for a few more cores. I guess what triggered me is you saying you cringe at the end users. They don't deserve that. They just want the stuff they buy to work reliably. And if they need a bunch of extra headroom for that to happen, well, that's just the sorry state of the industry. If you must cringe at someone, direct your cringe at developers.
vintermann 4y ago
I don't think Spotify will ban you for optional clients. Other clients are the whole point of their API. There's a bunch of rules you need to follow (largely about attribution) but I think at worst the dev will get their API key revoked - users should be perfectly safe.
kingforaday 4y ago
People forget about manually setting processor affinity. Requires manual intervention but allows you to account for that simple software. I posted this comment here because I also appreciate your name.

paulmd 4y ago

> I mean, they're not wrong. I have Discord sitting open at the login screen and it's burning 10% of a core. Run a few Electron apps and your core2duo suddenly becomes a core1uno. That is what I said about “people look at the measurement at the desktop and freak out about single-digit utilization without even realizing their processor is sitting in the lowest frequency state”. Is your processor even boosting all its cores when that 10% measurement is taken? In my experience usually it is not. Maybe different for Zen2/Zen3 but cpu measurement gets very complicated in general for those architectures since it can move between boost states so fast - it can boost so agilely that you can end up with garbage numbers because it’s moving between boost states faster than the task manager can enumerate the threads. It can move between boost states between the time you take the frequency measurement and the time you start enumerating the cpu load. This was a whole thing a couple years ago when people started looking at Zen2 and it turns out most third-party tools can’t handle this and only Ryzen Master gives you an accurate picture of what it’s doing. In general it is such a small amount of cpu that it’s not worth caring about. Also, typically while you game you’d have the overlay up and not the actual UI and that’s even faster - showing the login screen is likely slower than actually in game. Load up a game and the cpu will be loaded up harder and will stay boosted and then take your measurement of discord. People who are casually making observations about how intensive discord are never do that, it’s just “I see it using 6% at the desktop” [with the processor in the idle state rendering a full ui instead of just the overlay].

ntoskrnl 4y ago
I ran a quick `while true {}` in the background. It used 7B cycles per second (twice the clock speed for some reason?), while Discord used about 700M. Discord does drop lower if I minimize the window. But still, thousands of context switches per second, while completely logged out. I have no idea what it could be doing. You're right that I'm probably not benchmarking rigorously enough. But people don't care about any of this stuff. They care about "my FPS gets lower when Discord is open, pls fix". And they don't want to micromanage CPU usage either. Make sure you minimize Discord after starting the call, make sure you close that gmail tab during the game then open it back up when you're done so you don't miss notifications? No thanks. I'd rather just pay for a few more cores. I guess what triggered me is you saying you cringe at the end users. They don't deserve that. They just want the stuff they buy to work reliably. And if they need a bunch of extra headroom for that to happen, well, that's just the sorry state of the industry. If you must cringe at someone, direct your cringe at developers.

vintermann 4y ago

I don't think Spotify will ban you for optional clients. Other clients are the whole point of their API. There's a bunch of rules you need to follow (largely about attribution) but I think at worst the dev will get their API key revoked - users should be perfectly safe.

kingforaday 4y ago

People forget about manually setting processor affinity. Requires manual intervention but allows you to account for that simple software. I posted this comment here because I also appreciate your name.