Where Have All The Cycles Gone?

Mai writes "Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. This article takes a look at where all the precious processor time and memory are going."

Comments

My CPU Usage

[fembots]

2% word processing
3% gaming
5% internet
90% feet warming

Re:My CPU Usage

[BeyondALL]

that's why I run Seti@Home in the winter :)

Re:My CPU Usage

[Budha_man_99]

You must have a HPUX system.

Re:My CPU Usage

[aussie_a]

Us Firefox users have to have something to waste it on.

This week's action item

[fembots]

Launch a few applications simultaneously and time their start-ups. Try it again in five years to see whether the time has improved.

I think it'll be the same, given the same machine.

Re:This week's action item

[MrWim]

£100000000000000000 pounds for the first person that can accomplish this in a week

Re:This week's action item

[ender-]

I remember my Mac SE/30 fully booted in 6 seconds. That's with nothing in the system folder but System and Finder. After a lot of extensions, it was more like 15-20 seconds. Still, very fast.

It got worse and worse through the OSs. But now OSX is actually getting better and better. My G4 laptop boots as fast as my AMD PC desktop with better hardware - about 45 seconds (including pause for login).

As a sys-admin, I find that the faster computers get, the longer they take to boot [especially servers]. Eventually, computers will be so fast, that they will never finish booting.

Ender-

PS. Yes I stole that, I just don't remember where I first heard it.

What are they talking about?

[brian0918]

Windows 3.1 and Notepad run nice and fast on my 3.2GHz 8GB RAM box.

Re:What are they talking about?

[fembots]

But my Donkey Kong is throwing the barrels too fast!

Clippy

[rlp]

Someone needs to ask Clippy what he's doing with all those spare cycles.

Re:Clippy

[nine-times]

Browsing the Staples web site for mail-order brides.

Re:Clippy

[dexter riley]

It's a little-known fact that Clippy doesn't really go away when you click "just type the letter without help". He returns to a background process, where he lives with his wife, two kids, and the "Search Companion" Dog. Microsoft Bob lives there, too...well, he actually lives in a virtual cardboard box behind the "bowling alley" thread.

It's kinda like the Matrix, only less resource-intensive, and without as much "whoa" time.

Reminds me of a song...

[nharmon]

Where have all the cycles gone, long time passing
Where have all the cycles gone, long time ago
Where have all the cycles gone, gone to spyware everyone.

When will they ever learn?
When will they ev-ear learn?

Re:Reminds me of a song...

[Buran]

Where has all the spyware gone? Long time passing?
Where has all the spyware gone? Long time ago
Where has all the spyware gone?
Gone to spammers, everyone.

When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

(Apologies to Mikhail Sholokhov, Pete Seeger & parent poster)

India!

[Anonymous Coward]

They've all been outsourced to India (and all I got was this crappy T-shirt).

Hello world of today

[G3ckoG33k]

Hello world of today is larger than ten years ago

Re:Hello world of today

[Tumbleweed]

title Hello World Program (hello.asm)
; This program displays "Hello, World!"

dosseg
.model small
.stack 100h

.data
hello_message db 'Hello, World!',0dh,0ah,'$'

.code
main proc
mov ax,@data
mov ds,ax

mov ah,9
mov dx,offset hello_message
int 21h

mov ax,4C00h
int 21h
main endp
end main

"submitted by: bronson@engr.latech.edu (Patrick Bronson)"

Re:Hello world of today

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

It's true, 380K (WTF Mate?) vs 83K in '93. Still, whatever happened to just good old

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
for(;;)
{
printf ("Hello World!\n");
}
}

?

Re:Hello world of today

[tomjen]

For those how dont realise it - the above program is meant to run in dos - properly as a .com program - that is no overhead to .exe headers - but also limited to 640k and no external liberaries.

Re:Hello world of today

[Bloater]

ah crap. That's posted with plain text and the arsing thing got formatted all shitty!

;; hw.s
;; assemble with as -o hw.o hw.s
;; then link with ld -o hw hw.o
;; then run with ./hw
;;
;; does not account for interrupted or
;; incomplete write, needs more code for that,
;; can't be arsed :)

.globl _start
.text

_start:
movl $4,%eax
movl $1,%ebx
movl $msg,%ecx
movl $msg_end - msg,%edx
int $0x80
movl $1,%eax
movl $0,%ebx
int $0x80 .data

msg: .ascii "Hello, World!\n"
msg_end:

;; This is an attempt to get past the (ironically) lame slashdot lameness filter

Re:Hello world of today

[prockcore]

CREATE TABLE message (text char(15));
INSERT INTO message (text) VALUES ('Hello, world!');
SELECT text FROM message;
DROP TABLE message;

Kids today don't know optimization.

SELECT 'Hello, world!';

That's all there is too it.

Uhmmm, no.

[Scratch-O-Matic]

I didn't rtfa, but..no. Nine years ago I used to start my word processor (Ami Pro!), then go take a leak while it loaded. What a BS claim.

Where have all the cycles gone?

[Anonymous Coward]

My girlfriend has a cycle every month. It causes me problems, so I can imagine it must cause some problems for the computer as well.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[Stanistani]

The time to worry is when this cycle suspends atypically, causing a dependent issue.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[the real darkskye]

So thats where child processes come from!

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[AHarrison]

It's funny when a /.'er claims to have a girlfriend. I have to automatically assume that the girlfriend he is talking about is some government project from the 40's that is just that slow.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[zCyl]

That's why you don't want to fork outside of protected mode.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[mrbuttboy]

you, Sir, should be hit with a wet fish for that comment.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[alexo]

>> "My girlfriend has a cycle every month."
>
> Heat?

Running at about 380 nano-Hz, I would rule out heat issues.

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[pipingguy]

And to think that I used to consider lame-o piping engineering-related jokes about pipe nipples, trycocks and field erection as being funny...

Re:Where have all the cycles gone?

[Musrum]

which makes the grandparent the super geek IMO: enough geek knowledge to acurately describe a 30-31 day cycle in Hz; and enough geek ignorance to assume a 30-31 day menstral cycle...

Re:So

[kevinx]

but the icing isn't as good.

DCTI

[Leroy_Brown242]

distributed.net is where all the smart CPU cycles have gone! :)

Re:Just look at the size of a word document today

[cosmo7]

Here's that MS Word native format:

64 bytes: Cryptic Masonic signature
64 bytes: Reserved for Carnivore
8KB: Macro playground
8KB: Random extracts from King James Bible
64 bytes: Run-length encoded document contents
8KB: Uncompressed copy of above for compatibility

Re:Just look at the size of a word document today

[Just Some Guy]

64 bytes: Cryptic Masonic signature

As a Mason, let me be clear: the file format may indeed be cryptic, but we had nothing to do with this one.

Besides, we're more interested in handshakes and networking. We let the Teamsters handle the obfuscation and misdirection stuff.

Re:My memory Usage

[Yokaze]

> 60% itunes (for crying out loud, why does a 5 MB MP3 take 60+ MB of memory to play?)

Two things. First, could it possibly be under Windows? Try minimising it and tell us again.

Next. To put your question differently "Why does Matlab uses 300Mb just to add two numbers?" Because it is intended for more than that?

Re:On complexity... loat ... interface, and Magick

[Anonymous Coward]

The first corrolary to Clarke's Third Law states: "Any Technology which is distinguishable from Magic is insufficiently advanced>"

Isn't it obvious?

[UnknowingFool]

at where all the precious processor time and memory are going.

1) pr0n
2) Sharing pr0n.

Redmond is stockpiling CPU cycles.

[Chas]

It's a conspiracy!

Their software steals a few zillion here, a few bajillion there. Then, when we have exhausted all our naturally occurring cycles, they'll make a killing selling their horded stockpiles to us!

Cylons?

[wernst]

Am I the only person who read this as "Where Have all the Cylons Gone?"

Re:Its not bloat if you derive utility from it

[Anonymous Coward]

Where have all cycles gone
Long time passing

Where have all the cycles gone
Long long time ago

Where have all the cycles gone
Gone to gui bloat every one

When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn.

Re:Just look at the size of a word document today

[RWerp]

Because it is impossible for the program to do

lseek(..., SEEK_CUR);
write(fd, ...);

without inserting some permanent data structures into file on disk?

Thats easy

[BCW2]

I had a new Dell 3.4 come into the shop last week. It was slower than our cash register box(450 PII). Of course, if any box out there had 64 processes running at start up it would be a bit slow. The customer had the box for 3 weeks. First scan with Ad-Aware = 2803 critical items. A new store record. Plus 247 on Spybot, 8 virii, 15 trojans. I'm really surprised it didn't blue screen at boot (had 2 of those last week).

Crap uses up processor time.

Re:Just look at the size of a word document today

[rs79]

" _real hackers_ would use straight TeX or runoff or raw postscript!"

Oh, please, can we? I had one of the first postscript printers (on my Amiga 1000, serial #27) and while the language HP lasers used - HPGL seemed nice, Postscript seemed scary and complex; but it was obviously the one true way. Anything looking that much like FORTH had to be the answer.

So I bought the red book. I bought the blue book. I looked for the green book. I cultivated the Reid brothers as friends. I read comp.lang.postscipt. I imaged film at 1250 and then 2450 dpi. I typeset a book on my amiga that actually got printed. I became a barely competant PS hacker. I was ready for the postscript revolution!

Wake me up when it happens. Until then I have to put a gray border around some assholes webpage because his accountant wants it...

dup showpage

this, bitch.

To comment on the original topic, I was an Assembly progammmer from 70 to about 93 and I'm telling you people the problem with code bloat is C++.

Go back to C and check to see if it generated nice code and you can fit things on floppies again.

I'm a contract programming whore but you can't pay me to use C++. I'd sooner do COBOL.

Now, the interesting thing is there were TWO languages to come out of Bell Labs after C. C++ was only one of them, but it's creater had a Cerfian sense of self promotion and the language was popularized much to our collective dismay.

Jim Fleming aquired the rights to the other language, it's called C@+ and pronounced "cat".

A C@+ compiler written in C+@, fits on a floppy. I have one here. It's what we should be using if you want to use anything other than C.

Re:Not Lazy.

[Ritontor]

I used to play mp3s quite happily on a 68020 based Amiga 1200. Don't know why you were having so many problems with a 486... it'd have what, 10 times the processing power?