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Sure. Assume you're writing an OS from scratch that will be used by people, rather than by servers in a data center. Building the system to be as responsive a
by llm_trw 2y ago
Sure.
Assume you're writing an OS from scratch that will be used by people, rather than by servers in a data center.
Building the system to be as responsive as possible at the lowest possible latency is what you should do. Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Ignore how much more throughput you could have with a traditional OS. Users get a lot less annoyed by a job that takes 20 minutes instead of 10 than by a window which takes 3 seconds to resize.
This goes against every instinct that engineers have, because you're not optimizing for the scarce resource on your layer - cpu cycles above.
The way I got around that brain damage was to find what metric matters to the ultimate user and trace it back to the layers I had control over, then optimize the hell out of it.
- jordanb 2y ago> Even if you're burning half your CPU cycles on busy work waiting for user input. Of course then you slam into a wall when people want it to run on battery-powered devices.
- llm_trw 2y agoYou can't be everything for everyone. I'd imagine you'd still be using less power than the average JS hot mess today though.
- xinayder 2y agoSo, optimize for user experience rather than efficient use of resources?
- AndrewOMartin 2y agoThanks, this comment, and comment 40986327 from afiori cracked it for me.