[Techtalk] more cores, more slows

Wim De Smet kromagg at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 08:27:25 UTC 2012


Hey,

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 3:25 AM, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:
> Carla Schroder writes:
>> It seems the more powerful hardware gets, the more software sucks it up, so it
>> still feels like driving an old 486 SX.
>
> So true!
>
>> 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?
>
> On web pages like Facebook, is it possible that the problem is the
> network, not the CPU? I find a lot of sites are slow because they
> have to load ten squillion data chunks and scripts and, of course,
> ads, so part of the page will load then it'll just sit there waiting
> until all the ads and other pieces coming from other places load.
>
> If you haven't already, run a performance monitor and see what your
> CPU loads are like while waiting for the slow stuff.

Some badly written javascript can really be problematic. Twitter right
now is the worst offender for me, for some reason if you scroll down a
few pages it tends to peg the CPU at 100%. If you have some other tabs
open with intensive pages and are running a bunch of other stuff, that
can really slow things down. Looking at CPU load would be interesting,
probably it's something like this.

> Of course, flashblock, noscript, and disabling image animation will
> do a lot to reduce CPU load used by the browser.  These also cut
> down on distracting flashing/spinning in my peripheral vision while
> I'm trying to read page content -- drives me BATTY.  You can always
> enable features for the few pages where you actually want them.
> (The down side: tons of pages don't work at all unless you enable
> javascript. Have web developers never heard of <noscript> tags?)

Haven't bothered with this for a while, but probably blocking flash
will get you the most bang for your buck.

> Rudy Zijlstra writes:
>> I am happy that FireFox and Chrome are essentially single threaded, so
>> they typically use only a single CPU. I have a tendency to just leave
>
> Are they?  I thought separate tabs typically used separate processes
> (at least in Chrome) and thus separate CPUs.
>
> Miriam English writes:
>> 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
>
> That's always been true: developers expect hot new machines every year
> or two, and management obliges because otherwise they'll feel slighted.
>
> I've long felt that developers should be encouraged to use older,
> slower, lower memory machines as their primary desktop machines.
> You'd see a lot less software bloat. They could always have a few
> powerful machines around to use as build servers if needed.
> And yes, I say that as a developer myself.

I don't agree. Nobody writes slow software on purpose, while everyone
wants to be writing software to be better, easier and more pleasant to
use. You're constantly having to make trade-offs and that is hard. But
"bloat" is just a negative way to look at new features that have
become available because hardware now makes it possible. Take a file
system with journalling. Horribly wasteful of disk space, but could
you live without it? It would never have made sense on a disk that's
only 200 megs big, but on terabyte sized disks, it's an accepted
trade-off.

Aside from that. I'm taking the comment about putting developers on
fast machines a bit personally, but seriously there is a good reason
for it. The less time a developer spends waiting for his IDE to start
up or his tests to run or an application server to restart, the more
time he can spend actually working. It makes perfect sense to give
them the best possible computer you can get (within reason), since
that translates directly into the speed they can do their work.

Having done a summer job at a place where the computer they gave me
took 15 minutes just to start up and log in, I can tell you from first
hand experience that it did not make my software better or less
bloated. It just gave me less time to actually spend working on it.

regards,
Wim


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