brucedawson

6 ms·

31.
by brucedawson 3y ago
I blogged about that also: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/cars-in-canada-...
32.
by brucedawson 3y ago
"To be fair..." (chorus of Letterkenny voices) I appreciate the ASCII-only excuse, but I've corrected the omission anyway. Non-ASCII characters in randomascii - what will they think of next?
33.
by brucedawson 3y ago
The foreground process will only get scheduled ahead of the background process if there is a shortage of CPU power. On today's many-core consumer machines it is much more likely that the background process will continue to make progres
34.
by brucedawson 3y ago
My test program already proves that if you alloc-and-dirty memory aggressively then in background mode you will consume much more CPU time. If your metric is "interfering with foreground processes" then this is fine, but I think t
35.
by brucedawson 3y ago
That all makes sense (although I think this feature appeared in Windows 7 rather than XP), and I certainly understand the value of a background mode. But does the working-set cap _work_? In that scenario where you've got heavy memory p
36.
by brucedawson 3y ago
I'm running some monitoring that will tell me how setup.exe behaves on my machines. I tested it by forcing an update from Chrome. The private commit and private working set were 66.76 and 61.70 MiB, so no capping, but that makes sense
37.
by brucedawson 3y ago
What advantages would you get by being able to reserve memory with a finer than 64-KiB granularity? Especially with 64-bit Windows it seems quite unnecessary to have finer granularity. Am I missing something?
38.
by brucedawson 3y ago
Replying to myself, because this is important: In what scenario would be 32 MiB working-set limit, enforced when pages are swapped in, be more effective at saving memory than a similar limit enforced by the once-per-second balance-set-manag
39.
by brucedawson 3y ago
I'll just reiterate what is said later on. The API is documented. However this extremely important effect of calling the API is not. We called the API expecting lower I/O priority and lower CPU priority or something like that. We
40.
by brucedawson 3y ago
It's a good question. It could be that most people don't notice this things, those who don't don't report it, etc. Or maybe it only affects some people, but I can't think how that could be true. More mysteries
41.
by brucedawson 3y ago
Yep, that is generally what Windows does, using available memory for the disk cache. In the user trace the system had lots of disk cache (available memory) and lots of _free_ memory, so there really was zero value in trimming the working se
42.
by brucedawson 3y ago
Sorry, I don't own them so there's nothing I can do, unless I can buy them back
43.
by brucedawson 3y ago
The foreground applications will still be paged out, only now they will be paged out for longer. Without background mode setup.exe would have a 48 MiB working set, for a short period of time. With background mode setup.exe has a 32 MiB work
44.
by brucedawson 3y ago
What's wrong with using 32 MiB of memory? That's a relatively small amount, especially if you're trying to patch a 225 MB DLL. And I would argue that the 32 MiB is worse than arbitrary - it is pointless. I have been thinking
45.
by brucedawson 3y ago
There probably is a way to find what processes have this mode enabled, but it's probably more productive to search github for references to the problematic constant.
46.
by brucedawson 3y ago
I reported the documentation bug. I don't use Feedback Hub because it never works for this type of issue. I know that some Microsoft developers will see this blog post and I hope that internal bugs get filed. But ultimately as a non-pa
47.
by brucedawson 4y ago
And local variables, including tracking where they are stored at various points in a function
48.
by brucedawson 4y ago
Even modern CPUs can explore the 32-bit space extremely quickly. If you get a 128-core CPU running at 4 GHz then can do 2^32 ops in 1/128 seconds. Pretty amazing. The improvement in the nine years since I wrote the article is fun to se
49.
by brucedawson 4y ago
That is because: > We repeatedly make a political decision in the US not to prioritize them Public transit can be fast and efficient if it is prioritized. That may require raising the federal tax on gasoline (last raised thirty years ago
50.
by brucedawson 4y ago
I bicycle commuted for years in an American city. It is as safe as your local council decides it should be, and my commute always felt safe. Don't give in to the belief that unsafe cycling is inevitable.
51.
by brucedawson 4y ago
Just remember that this is a societal choice. Biking can be safe and efficient. In Vancouver BC they have prioritized modes of transportation other than driving, including creating a dense network of cycling paths and slow-streets. There is
52.
by brucedawson 4y ago
The built environment can make a huge difference to how dangerous drivers are. Slip lanes that allow right-turns without slowing down could be eliminated, thus reducing or slowing many vehicle/pedestrian crashes. Right-turn-on-red coul
53.
by brucedawson 4y ago
This sounds like exactly my symptoms. Check for crashes.
54.
by brucedawson 4y ago
Switching is a huge hassle, with uncertainty about whether things will actually be better or not, or if I will just hit different problems. Windows is actually excellent in many ways (see the tools I used to analyze this) so I would definit
55.
by brucedawson 4y ago
I don't think that is true. If they had that many developers burning down performance issues then bugs like this would (IMHO) be getting fixed earlier. Anecdotally it sounds like a lot of customers are hitting this bug and I'd lov
56.
by brucedawson 4y ago
They only send crash reports if you opt-in to the customer experience improvement program (or whatever it's called), I believe. In general I think that sending crash dumps is _great_. Sending crash dumps is the number one reason why so
57.
by brucedawson 4y ago
An underappreciated consequence of this is that if doubling the number of cores doubles performance (meaning the multi-threading is good) but going on to the hyperthreads only gives a 15% speedup then that means that in the hyperthreaded ca
58.
by brucedawson 4y ago
McAfee/Trellix says that they have fixed the bug in the latest (7.4.0) version of their disk encryption product. So apparently my guesses about the root cause were correct.
59.
by brucedawson 4y ago
Interesting conclusion given that I found two functions and a (presumed) third-party driver/what-not that were violating the ABI. One of these was causing crashes, and the other one was going to. The crashes went on for over a year and
60.
by brucedawson 4y ago
My experience is that most non-trivial assembly language is doing processing of large chunks of data (high-precision math, encrypting blocks of data, FFTs, etc.) and therefore the startup cost of the function is not significant, so a tiny b

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