3 ms·
Ask HN: What actually causes a computer/program to run slowly?
A friend of mine asked and I couldn't answer. Maybe you guys can help me out.
- tokenadult 18y agoA badly chosen algorithm can waste immense numbers of processor cycles doing something that could be done more efficiently with a better algorithm. Sometimes a bad algorithm can run into memory size limits or other issues that stop execution completely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_efficiency
- thexa4 18y agoMost of the time a slow program is waiting on input/output to slow devices, like the network or hard drives. Badly chosen algorithms can also lead to slow applications.
- msie 18y agoI always wondered if a lot of programs were riddled with timeouts (directly, or indirectly through calls to apis) and if eliminating them would make the computer faster (although more prone to errors ;) ).
- noodle 18y agotypically, i/o operations, which can be caused by numerous things. or, if you're just crunching some serious numbers. if your "computer is running slow"(tm), its probably from paging/thrashing due to not having enough ram or having too many things open. i've fixed too many "my computer is running slow" problems that ended up being someone having 100 IE windows open at once.