Re: [NTLK] OT: Wasted CPU cycles

On 03.03.2008, at 08:46, Jon Glass wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Martin Joseph <NT@stillnewt.org>
> wrote:
>> Yes, there are many examples of bloatware including OS's.
>>
>> This bloat is generally unfelt by the end user, as the speeds and
>> disk spaces involved in the newer systems make this bloat moot.
>
> This is very true. And here's a quiz. If I were to ask you, which has
> more bloat--Linux or Mac OS X Tiger. I doubt anybody would say
> "Linux", but why is it that every Linux distro I've tried--OpenSUSE,
> Yellow Dog Linux, Fedora 8 and Ubuntu (all three main flavors-Ubuntu,
> Xubuntu and Kubuntu), and every desktop under Linux--Gnome, Xfce and
> KDE--all make my Mac (Pismo, 2000 Powerbook with a G4 brain) run
> slower? Granted, launching apps is faster, and scrolling can be
> frustratingly fast, but moving windows is painful, and leaves ugly
> artifacts on the screen while dragging, and switching desktops can
> take far longer than I would ever expect.

This sounds *very* much like you have a wrong (or not hardware-
optimized) video driver installed. Even in my virtual environment,
Linux runs snappy.

But it is not only the bloat that makes our programs slow. It is the
seemingly little things. Wanting to be able to user-configure menu
items and keyboard shortcuts requires reading of confguration files
from disk. Modularizing (the ability to replace the text editor in
your developer environment, for example) requires the loading of
Libraries, dll, or plugins. That is the disk-intense stuff that slows
down the startup.

Next there are all the graphics gimmicks. Antialiased fonts - I love
them - are a true CPU and GPU cycle hog. Transparent windows? Drop
shadows? Reflections? Or even milky glass effects with filtering and
distortion? These do nothing to readability, but take away cycles from
the GPU which it should spend for scrolling and rendering. Worst case,
the Graphics Board has no full Quartz Extreme / DirectX whatever
support, and the CPU is kept busy rendering.

There is another huge resource waste. Programmers today just plug huge
existing modules together. Each of these modules can do every
imagineable taks for some kind of problem. This seems ice, but one
ends up with a large program that takes ages to load and tons of
memory to run with huge amounts of dead code from overbroad libraries.

Shooting the sparrow with a conon, as we say in Germany. Sure, you
will kill the sparrow... .

Matthias

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