6 ms·

YouTube increases FreeBASIC performance (2019)

178 points by giancarlostoro 11mo ago

TonyTrapp 11mo 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-jv 11mo 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 11mo ago
  The best one, of course, is the one where Windows would install faster if you jiggled the mouse.
  - jaffa2 11mo 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)
    - ninkendo 11mo ago
      No, it has to do with every time you move the mouse over a window, a hover event is sent to the application, which runs its main event loop. Either the installer only updated its progress bar when an event happened (in which case it would only appear to be going faster, because the progress bar would move more smoothly) or there was some really terribly written code that literally only made progress when an (unrelated) event happened. My guess is the former.
      - moron4hire 11mo ago
        Being a bored kid in the 90s with nothing better to do, I had timed it. It was actually faster.
      - fransje26 11mo ago
        No, that's not quite correct. It was not giving the impression of being faster, it was faster. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
      - anthk 11mo ago
        IRQ's. It was faster.
    - ygra 11mo ago
      Explanation for that is here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=104759 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=10...
      - jaffa2 11mo ago
        Aha! Thanks for the link. So it is a kind of side effect thing.
    - joshuaissac 11mo ago
      There must be so many subtle features like these that people use subconsciously, and when they try to move to another operating system, they try it, nothing happens and they get frustrated.
  - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    Makes me wonder how much of Windows is like Pokemon glitching, a community that never stops, even several generations ahead.
  - fhdkweig 11mo 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.
    - aa-jv 11mo ago
      I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type: $ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf - .. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus: $ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..
- antonvs 11mo 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/nf-timeapi-timebeginperiod https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/...
  - aa-jv 11mo 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.
    - ninkendo 11mo ago
      > There should at least be mention that changing this resolution can affect other processes. That sorta is what it’s saying. If you don’t set it yourself, you won’t get any better than the “default system resolution”. But if the default system resolution changes (say, by entering a sort of “performance mode” when playing games or watching videos), then it would imply it will affect all processes that are using the default, right?
user3939382 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  - user3939382 11mo 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 11mo ago
  The NT kernel is splendid. The OS is not.
  - user3939382 11mo ago
    For its context I agree but the whole chip arch is rotten so it’s doomed too unfortunately
mrozbarry 11mo 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/ 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Linux also does timer coalescing? I'm not sure there's any real difference wrt. this behavior.
- Waterluvian 11mo 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.
0xcb0 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Is it a Mac ? I think Macs always do that when they're actively listening with the internal microphone.
  - 0xcb0 11mo 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 11mo ago
  That is something that Macs do at the system level (if you were experiencing this on a Mac)
wiz21c 11mo ago
IS FreeBaisc still a thing nowadays ? I understand it's surely less popular, but are there people using it on HN ?
- giancarlostoro 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
    Have you checked out Gambas[1]? 1. https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html
- zoeysmithe 11mo ago
  I imagine 99% of its use are people maintaining quickbasic legacy apps.
ryandrake 11mo 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.
- supportengineer 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ghssds 11mo ago
    The next mainstream will be made of the principles of the ones standing for their today.
- Bratmon 11mo 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?
  - ryandrake 11mo 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.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Bratmon 11mo ago
      I still don't get your objection. Changing system timer settings is required to show HD videos on a browser window in a smooth way. Are you objecting to the fact that that's the case or that browser windows are being used to show HD videos?

178 points by giancarlostoro 11mo 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-jv 11mo 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 11mo ago
The best one, of course, is the one where Windows would install faster if you jiggled the mouse.
- jaffa2 11mo 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)
  - ninkendo 11mo ago
    No, it has to do with every time you move the mouse over a window, a hover event is sent to the application, which runs its main event loop. Either the installer only updated its progress bar when an event happened (in which case it would only appear to be going faster, because the progress bar would move more smoothly) or there was some really terribly written code that literally only made progress when an (unrelated) event happened. My guess is the former.
    - moron4hire 11mo ago
      Being a bored kid in the 90s with nothing better to do, I had timed it. It was actually faster.
    - fransje26 11mo ago
      No, that's not quite correct. It was not giving the impression of being faster, it was faster. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
    - anthk 11mo ago
      IRQ's. It was faster.
  - ygra 11mo ago
    Explanation for that is here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=104759 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=10...
    - jaffa2 11mo ago
      Aha! Thanks for the link. So it is a kind of side effect thing.
  - joshuaissac 11mo ago
    There must be so many subtle features like these that people use subconsciously, and when they try to move to another operating system, they try it, nothing happens and they get frustrated.
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  Makes me wonder how much of Windows is like Pokemon glitching, a community that never stops, even several generations ahead.
- fhdkweig 11mo 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.
  - aa-jv 11mo ago
    I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type: $ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf - .. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus: $ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..
antonvs 11mo 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/nf-timeapi-timebeginperiod https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/...
- aa-jv 11mo 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.
  - ninkendo 11mo ago
    > There should at least be mention that changing this resolution can affect other processes. That sorta is what it’s saying. If you don’t set it yourself, you won’t get any better than the “default system resolution”. But if the default system resolution changes (say, by entering a sort of “performance mode” when playing games or watching videos), then it would imply it will affect all processes that are using the default, right?

user3939382 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- user3939382 11mo 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 11mo ago
The NT kernel is splendid. The OS is not.
- user3939382 11mo ago
  For its context I agree but the whole chip arch is rotten so it’s doomed too unfortunately

mrozbarry 11mo 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/ 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
Linux also does timer coalescing? I'm not sure there's any real difference wrt. this behavior.
Waterluvian 11mo 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.

0xcb0 11mo 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 11mo ago
Is it a Mac ? I think Macs always do that when they're actively listening with the internal microphone.
- 0xcb0 11mo 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 11mo ago
That is something that Macs do at the system level (if you were experiencing this on a Mac)

wiz21c 11mo ago

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

giancarlostoro 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Have you checked out Gambas[1]? 1. https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html
zoeysmithe 11mo ago
I imagine 99% of its use are people maintaining quickbasic legacy apps.

ryandrake 11mo 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.

supportengineer 11mo ago
[flagged]
- ghssds 11mo ago
  The next mainstream will be made of the principles of the ones standing for their today.
Bratmon 11mo 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?
- ryandrake 11mo 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.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Bratmon 11mo ago
    I still don't get your objection. Changing system timer settings is required to show HD videos on a browser window in a smooth way. Are you objecting to the fact that that's the case or that browser windows are being used to show HD videos?