[Techtalk] more cores, more slows

[Miriam English]

Hi Carla,

Every time I'm tempted to get impatient with my computer I try to remind 
myself of what seemed fast back in the 80s, when I had to go make myself 
a cup of tea while waiting for a few Kbytes-long program to load from 
cassette tape. While that's good for my frame of mind it doesn't really 
help with the computer when it should really be running much faster than 
what we see.

As others have noted the web is a major evil in this respect. I always 
breathe a great sigh of relief when I encounter a web page that consists 
of ordinary text with simple HTML markup and no, or minimal, CSS. I try 
to avoid sites that use flash, javascript, and megabytes of CSS (though 
it seems to be getting harder of late). Flash is a major offender. I 
notice my computer really starts to bog down when I have pages with lots 
of flash in them, especially if I have a few open in tabs. It seems the 
more wealthy the corporation, the worse their webpage design. I tend to 
pick the web browser for the site if revisiting. Really burdensome sites 
I browse with dillo, or even Lynx. Other sites get Firefox or Iron or 
another of the half-dozen web browsers I keep on my machine.

Another thing that has bothered me for a while now is the bloat in Linux 
desktop GUIs. Luckily, unlike proprietary OSes we have the choice of 
using minimalist window managers, like JWM and tiny, efficient file 
managers like ROX that give old computers a chance to perform well. This 
is one of the reasons I like Puppy Linux -- it makes old, slow computers 
run fast, and bright, new computers even faster (you don't even have to 
install it, but can run it from live CD or flash drive).

It bugs me that developers largely seem fixated on the fastest computers 
with the speediest internet connections, ignoring the fact that most 
people still have old computers and slow internet. There is this 
wasteful perception -- at the center of so many of our problems in the 
larger world -- that we have very fast CPUs/GPUs, and plenty of disk 
space, and plenty of RAM, so it doesn't matter if we bring the processor 
to its knees, fill our hard drives with bloat, or make applications that 
require obscene amounts of RAM. It is the same thing as making 
energy-inefficient vehicles, using throwaway products, too much 
packaging, and so on.

There is a further problem that multicore processors are really still a 
technology in development. We can build them, but I think programming to 
make best use of them is still in its early stages.

Cheers,

	- Miriam


Carla Schroder wrote:
> hiho,
>
> It seems the more powerful hardware gets, the more software sucks it up, so it
> still feels like driving an old 486 SX. My main PC has an AMD Phenom 8750
> triple-core processor with 4GB RAM, and a discrete Nvidia graphics card
> running the Nvidia driver. I use this machine for video, audio, and photo
> editing.  I thought that with three cores there would be less lag on all of
> these CPU-intensive tasks, and it is better than the old cheapie one-core
> CPUs, but I'm still feeling like it should be better.
>
> The biggest offender is Web pages. Facebook is nasty, of course, with all of
> its squillion random scripts coded by gerbils on crack, and lots of other. Is
> it worth upgrading to Intel? Or a higher-end AMD? Am I forever doomed to be
> disappointed?
>
> Carla
>

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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