4 ms·

Lol. This gets rediscovered every few years. Pretty funny. Slowest I’ve run any modern OS on an x86 chip would probably be about 60mhz pentium 1. I used to d

by helf 4y ago

Lol. This gets rediscovered every few years. Pretty funny. Slowest I’ve run any modern OS on an x86 chip would probably be about 60mhz pentium 1. I used to daily drive Ubuntu (I think 5.04?) with Beryl and Compiz on a pentium 75 with 512mb of ram (awesome socket5 board) and a pci nvidia 6200. The offloaded composition etc helped a lot. Was a very snappy box all things considered. Helped that I also ran an IDE SSD on it.

Avamander 4y ago
> The offloaded composition etc helped a lot. Was a very snappy box all things considered This has started to bother me recently, performance has gone such a long way but some things are still so damn slow for no good reason. The input lag article gets posted on HN yearly. Something I just recently encountered, why does Windows still install updates for tens of minutes on a multi-GB/s SSD? Why do email clients lag with just 100 000 emails? It's a bit sad I find.
- anamexis 4y ago
  Slow OS updates drive me bonkers on macOS, too. What could it possibly be doing for 40 minutes to upgrade a minor version on a new M1 mac with 32GB RAM and an SSD?
  - helf 4y ago
    MacOS/OSX has long had insanely slow updating. It’s always bothered me. The time estimator on the installers for it are not even suggestions.
- helf 4y ago
  Right? A lot of people will start going on about how modern OSes “do more” blah blah but a lot of that is complete hokum. Imo it’s the endless layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks getting in the way. It’s hard to get a modern OS to respond to input in under, what, 80ms? I’m not a programmer nor am I a systems designer (for a living. I dabble in this stuff tho) so I can’t really speak for a lot of it but it’s really annoying how modern stuff doesn’t seem to prioritize the interface performance both in input and output over everything else like you’d think they should. At least for consumer end user systems. The overall perceived performance of my systems has sorta gotten back in line with my systems from the 90s with the advent of fast SSDs. My NeXTs, BeOS systems, SGIs etc were all, perceptually, snappy (OK, the SGIs were hit or miss at times lol). And that’s on low RAM and slow HDDs. But they ran smaller, tighter programs for the most part. My PCs, running windows especially, seemed to get slower and slower after NT4 (and maybe Windows 2000) from my perspective as all the programs I used ballooned in overall size and switched to “modern” frameworks and cross-platform designs. Finally started to get decent SSDs and the performance started getting back to how I either remembered older systems or could objectively compare against the ones I still had/have. You can sorta improve things in a lot of systems by manually changing CPU and IO priority for various system processes (and other tweaks to system schedulers etc). Like on Windows I use Prio to reset CPU affinity and priority for various processes on reboots. The dwm process I always have set to real-time which helps a lot in responsiveness for Windows. On android, I run some scripts I wrote to renice the IO and CPU priority for several processes related to the UI. I just feel like this shouldn’t be a thing in 2022. BeOS was insanely multithreaded and prioritized the UI seemingly above all else. It was always snappy :( Ok, I’ll stop rambling like an old man.
  - chinabot 4y ago
    225 processes running on my Windows 11 PC at startup, back with windows XP I got this down to 14, I no longer even try. Microsoft should plant a couple of trees for every copy of Windows 11 installed.

by helf 4y ago

Avamander 4y ago

> The offloaded composition etc helped a lot. Was a very snappy box all things considered This has started to bother me recently, performance has gone such a long way but some things are still so damn slow for no good reason. The input lag article gets posted on HN yearly. Something I just recently encountered, why does Windows still install updates for tens of minutes on a multi-GB/s SSD? Why do email clients lag with just 100 000 emails? It's a bit sad I find.

anamexis 4y ago
Slow OS updates drive me bonkers on macOS, too. What could it possibly be doing for 40 minutes to upgrade a minor version on a new M1 mac with 32GB RAM and an SSD?
- helf 4y ago
  MacOS/OSX has long had insanely slow updating. It’s always bothered me. The time estimator on the installers for it are not even suggestions.
helf 4y ago
Right? A lot of people will start going on about how modern OSes “do more” blah blah but a lot of that is complete hokum. Imo it’s the endless layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks getting in the way. It’s hard to get a modern OS to respond to input in under, what, 80ms? I’m not a programmer nor am I a systems designer (for a living. I dabble in this stuff tho) so I can’t really speak for a lot of it but it’s really annoying how modern stuff doesn’t seem to prioritize the interface performance both in input and output over everything else like you’d think they should. At least for consumer end user systems. The overall perceived performance of my systems has sorta gotten back in line with my systems from the 90s with the advent of fast SSDs. My NeXTs, BeOS systems, SGIs etc were all, perceptually, snappy (OK, the SGIs were hit or miss at times lol). And that’s on low RAM and slow HDDs. But they ran smaller, tighter programs for the most part. My PCs, running windows especially, seemed to get slower and slower after NT4 (and maybe Windows 2000) from my perspective as all the programs I used ballooned in overall size and switched to “modern” frameworks and cross-platform designs. Finally started to get decent SSDs and the performance started getting back to how I either remembered older systems or could objectively compare against the ones I still had/have. You can sorta improve things in a lot of systems by manually changing CPU and IO priority for various system processes (and other tweaks to system schedulers etc). Like on Windows I use Prio to reset CPU affinity and priority for various processes on reboots. The dwm process I always have set to real-time which helps a lot in responsiveness for Windows. On android, I run some scripts I wrote to renice the IO and CPU priority for several processes related to the UI. I just feel like this shouldn’t be a thing in 2022. BeOS was insanely multithreaded and prioritized the UI seemingly above all else. It was always snappy :( Ok, I’ll stop rambling like an old man.
- chinabot 4y ago
  225 processes running on my Windows 11 PC at startup, back with windows XP I got this down to 14, I no longer even try. Microsoft should plant a couple of trees for every copy of Windows 11 installed.