Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Windows 10. It's particularly bad on the login/unlock screen, which often takes multiple seconds to even appear when you get back to your machine - frustrating when you're in a hurry.
With that said, some of it is certainly application specifically. Office 365 Outlook, for example, is particularly egregious in this regard: switching between windows, or between mail and calendar is awful. Microsoft Teams also regularly hangs for multiple seconds when switching between teams, or between chats. Extremely aggravating.
Edit: on the other hand, computers do start up a heck of a lot faster than they used to.
At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...
I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.
Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.
On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10.
We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, which is OS-assisted. The X1 Yoga with S3 can both suspend and resume faster than windows 10, despite not having S0I3 (and has longer battery lifetime to booth).
And by fast I mean that by the time the lid is up, the OS is ready. By contrast, windows 10 seems to always shuffle for several seconds after resume, even on the carbon 6th gen.
So please...
One of the problems here is that power-draining can happen by different components. Quite popular are graphics chips, but other components can be part too. For example, a friend of mine has problems with his device waking up from s2idle during transport. That is not exactly what you would expect in such a discussion, but from a users perspective, he has less time to work with his device given his usage pattern.
For me, this isn't much of a problem as I prefer working on a desktop, but I wouldn't accuse someone of being a liar just because he had a bad experience with power consumption on Linux.
acpi patched_dsdt.aml
This has the advantage of not requiring any manual intervention every time your kernel is updated. The downside is that if you try to dual boot W10, it will BSOD on boot with an ACPI error. To overcome this, take the original dsdt.aml and load it in a custom (not auto-probed) menu entry for windows. You can just clone the auto-probed line, and add before the chainloader line:
acpi old_dsdt.aml
Sadly, the 6th edition of the Carbon also runs waaay hotter than the 3rd, and I did notice occasional coil whine which was previously absent. When running normally the kernel writes regularly about thermal warnings. It seems that power and heat management is not well managed in this edition, and I see similar reports for the x1 yoga 3rd gen.
My system is exceptionally lean. I run bspwm and the radios are always off except WiFi. Still, I feel like I could get a lot more from this laptop. I cannot (and I certainly wouldn't want to) install Windows on dual boot to make a comparison though.
What distribution do you use?
I personally use debian unstable with a tiling window manager (awesomewm) without a specific DE. However, I generally setup Mint for all my colleagues on the same laptop lines, and there's one colleague running Arch. We all have very similar battery lifetimes.
High-end laptop lines (Dell, HP, Lenovo) have actually pretty good linux support, they are almost always intel i5+ cpus with integrated graphics which are all very similar. There is next to zero setup required in almost any case. This is known. The drivers are tried and tested. I've never experienced any random "power management issue". Suspend/resume/battery consumption/acpi is working perfectly fine. What else does qualify for "power managment"??
I've been supporting a team of 20+ people with these lines in a mixed environment, and linux since more than a decade was always basically plug and play.
There have been some quirks in some models, which generally required some tweaks in the kernel boot line, to fix issues with backlight tweaking.
Sure, but Linux really ought to shine on the low-end laptops.
But this doesn't save you from crappy hardware, which is why this kind of argument is a non-starter for me. How well does current windows editions work on low-end crappy laptops that sell for the lowest tier? Not great. These laptops have plenty of little issues on windows as well.
Maybe better than linux, because the drivers have way more work-arounds than linux has.
Have you ever seen the internal linux quirks table to work around buggy and downright horrid hardware? That's what you get with those. If it works at all is thanks to the patience of people that put in the time to work those issues around. I frankly do not blame linux if it doesn't work well with such hardware.
Ah! So that's what's going on :D.
And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.
"Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly.
Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.
I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that extensively. I really only boot into Windows to play games these days.
Edit: Having tried in on my laptop, installing the gjs + libgjs0g version 1.53.3 debs from http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gjs/ onto a bionic install seems to work fine. Worth trying if this bug is affecting you?
that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/)
I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.
I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.
This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.
Meanwhile, my SSD filled work mac bogs down in completely unpredictable ways, with weird antivirus scans that I cannot control somehow destroying javascript performance, and needing to be rebooted more than weekly to stay functional in multiple ways. I was similarly dissatisfied with OSX in the mid 2000s when I used it at school. I just don't get it
I'm playing with a Win10 machine at home, the CPU and RAM is far in excess of our work machines but it is so slow to use. It seems to regularly become unresponsive, programs take ages to start, it seems to be continually working away in the background doing 'nothing'. It's a truly horrible experience.
It's buttery smooth and I get no noticeable lag. Exactly 7 seconds from power button to login screen on a cold boot too.
Just today on Patreon, I was going through a creators posts. After about 100 posts or so the page was barely usable. Animations took minutes to complete, loading more posts took 30 seconds and Firefox (Chrome quit after 80 posts when Linux' OOM decided that the fun was over) was struggling to repaint the view port, lots of white areas. At the end other applications were severely lagging too both because Patreon's webshit was pulling 80% of all cores when doing nothing on the page and the Linux kernel was shoveling everything into ssd swap like crazy. Animations didn't work at all (likely if I waited 60 minutes it would have shown the first frames) and clicking on links to open in a new tab took about 15 seconds until the JS behind the scenes completed.
It's simply shitty design that there is no obvious way to say "show all posts from January 2016" and jump back month by month. Or atleast UNLOADING posts I've long scrolled past.
I have 8 Cores and 32 GB of RAM at my disposal, a website has no excuse to have that much of a shit performance. Especially when it's a platform where lots of money flows.
But hey, it's cheaper this way.
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The issue is not thread priorization. Or processes. Your mail app and android studio are both competing for resources and either android studio will lag because the mail app is running on all the CPUs or the other way round. The OS doesn't have a way to tell which is more important and trusting applications to tell is not really reliable (devs will just say "I'm the most important").
A real partial issue is that a lot of modern apps are not engineered to save resources. They just take what they need and the user better provide enough CPU and RAM to do it. There is no sense in self-limiting in a lot of modern apps.
Frontend devs should wake up to the reality that they aren't running on the only instance of the chrome browser with only one tab open. There is other apps around too. There are other browsers around too. Sharing resources gives the user a better experience than just taking them all for yourself.
Edit: Apart from being able to confirm the less-than-stellar performance problems, I had no trouble with memory at all. Chromium hovered at about 2G of memory. It fairly aggressively garbage collected as I browsed different sections and different creators.
This case isn't some web app that uses infinite memory; the contended resource is a lock.
Our processors are now not advancing nearly as quickly as people can create solutions for them. Case in point - Virtual Reality, which has technically been on the market for years, but out of reach for most users.
If processors are not improving, everything else slows down. Graphics, games, and the internet ten years from now will look pretty much the same as it does today.
My point is, by design, an operating system that has a fully async interface can dispense with locks altogether. Resource contention is then properly resolved through queuing. The OS can then strictly enforce a priority scheme on its various queues, preventing an opportunistic thread from dominating the system. Or enabling higher priority requests to be serviced first. But that decision is made intelligently, not as a result of optimizing to minimize context switching.
No locks means this can never happen.
Async style enforces a kind of minimalism that in my opinion simplifies the problem space overall. Obviously, one has to learn different approaches to problem definition and solution to embrace event-driven coding.
To me, in the comparison of linear programming handling an exception when your call stack is 5 levels deep (or maybe 3 in a different use case), having to bubble the appropriate handling at each of those levels, versus async where in your closure you have a 4-line if/else construct that fires off one event for success and a different event for failure, async wins the simplicity competition every time.
If race conditions are an issue, events should be dispatched through a single-threaded finite state machine dispatcher for resolution. Such events can fire up multiple worker threads to do their bidding, but when state changes, that goes through the dispatcher which inherently resolves all races.
If web developers never learn to write multi-processing, multi-threaded, multi-programming, event-driven, decentralized or distributed applications the web will forever look like it looks today.
This is such a contradictory sentence. The whole point of Moore's law was that software developers could do what they want, freed by limitations of hardware because in 18 months, when their product was ready for launch, the hardware became capable enough to handle it.
Forcing developers to focus more and more on performance (via threading, distributed systems, and custom die co-processors), rather than innovating new applications, is a huge shift. It's like the hardware developers gave up, and tell the software developers that it's in your hands now.
Also, comparing a hello world program 10 years ago to today is a meaningless comparison because no one uses hello world to do anything. A better example would be Excel in 1998 and Excel in 2018. Sure today, it's a 500 megabytes instead of a just a handful, but it does quite a bit more (for better or worse).
Also if General processors are now hitting a wall, it’s only a matter of time before GPUs do.
Locks are hard.
Yes, especially when the OS does nothing to help a backing-off contender acquire a resource that is greedily dropped and contended by another thread.
> I'll go into more details in part two
Great! In anticipation of that, I have a couple questions:
> but part of the problem would have reliably disappeared if I had been running a single-core CPU
Single-core or single-thread? Does the atomic instruction switch to the other HyperThread generally?
Do you see the same symptoms if you have a sufficient number of other unrelated CPU-intensive threads trying to run that the OS will want to deschedule the aggressive contender thread(s) from time to time?
The ways to deal with this that come to mind are the aggressive contender thread(s) sleeping from time to time, or yielding in hopes the decision about waking up the thread recovers some fairness lost by the decision about which lock waiter win. Perhaps one could just put the lock's cache line on as equal a NUMA footing as it can (a flush, for instance) so the aggressive contender has a chance to lose a race. However, having to reason about cache coherency protocols (differing from vendor to vendor and even same-vendor model to model) seems like a huge headache that anyone would want to avoid if possible. Is a fix described in the long crbug discussion?
Making the locks fair or occasionally fair would solve this problem, but perhaps cause others.
I think that an appropriate CPU-saturating background task might have made my machine more responsive, which is deliciously weird.
I too wonder why UI threads are still so obnoxiously tied to... everything else. Put UI in the fast lane! (At least until some bug tries to make a bajillion calls a second)
Then I remembered how much more complicated it is to write proper multithreaded GUI code :P
(Although with 24 cores...)
Totally agree that Windows is the worst of the bunch and its still a huge problem on macOS.
On Fedora+i3wm, when my desktop opens from the login it is "immediately" ready for input. I've tried to ask some people to compare between macOS and my laptop and they say they don't notice a difference, so I think people are conditioned to waiting with these little unconscious pauses they don't notice.
I wonder is there a way to do accurate and meaningful timings for responsiveness in these situations.
This is so ugly I hesitated to post it, but here: https://github.com/jakeogh/glidestop
In the case of glide, having tabbed take care of all of that would be much easier, or even better it would be integrated directly into a "tabbed like" process that acts more like a windowmanager and does not necessary have "tabs". I'm thinking of a more generalized version to tabbed with a --notabs switch or something.
Add locks and you add many more causes for the main thread to be blocked beyond pure computation.
And that leads us to the real problem. Chips are not advancing at the rate they should. Additional performance gains come from adding multiple chips to the same die, not making the chips faster. This forces programmers to think about parallelism, which makes everything harder.
In the mid-90s, chips were improving so faster that you wouldn't need to consider special tricks, you could just wait 3 or 4 months and a chip would come out that handled your application.
Now single processor performance is basically at a standstill and it's up to the software developer to spread work in parallel to make things faster.
A weird interpretation of a singular event in the history of technology. No wheel maker complained because wood wasn’t getting twice as strong every 18 months.
We’ve been taught for decades that chips will double in performance every 18 months (I know Moore said transistor count, not performance). It’s now turning out to be untrue. We think about the singularity all the time, but haven’t properly considered what will happen if technology improvements stall.
But good luck with that! You're fighting against the most powerful force in the universe: economics (more specifically sunk cost into existing investments). "Soft"ware is a lot "harder" once economics are taken into account.
The field has made progress in "figuring out" the general problem in the form of other programming models but that stuff is not close to gaining popularity on the desktop. Things like STM, lockless peristent data structures, and shared-nothing concurrency.
There are also attempts to make C++ & locks real-time friendly, but the programming model is already prohibitively hard wrt correctness, and the added complexity explosion from handling aborted locks would make it completely unmanageable.
The best advance in recent years, is recognizing that most latency is due to network access, and using single-threaded, but asynchronous models like in javascript. It definitely does not remove race conditions, but makes them much easier to understand and debug.
Software will always expand in resource usage as computing becomes faster. This ought to be an adage that more programmers should think about.
My machine randomly has input delay or mouse even after new install...
And a slow hard disk is often the bottleneck, in case of windows.
Haven't we figured out thread prioritization by now? Can't we make sure something draws 60 times per second while things are going on in the background? My Android Studio build should be totally isolated from my inbox.
I know this is a bit orthogonal to the article and that I'm certainly not well informed about Operating Systems these days, I'd love to get schooled in the comments.