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

Just look at the size of a word document today

[marika]

I used to be able to fit the system, the finder, mac write and 3 X 8K docs on a floppy. Now I could barely fit a word document.

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

[bongoras]

But you can still fit an entire book on a floppy if you use LaTeX. The morale of the story: Don't want a slow, bloated system? Then tough it out and don't use one. But don't complain when you have to type:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Open a terminal window by right clicking on your desktop and selecting ``Open Terminal''
\item In that window, become root by typing {\tt su}
\item Now put a blank CD in your drive and burn the iso image to it by typing \\
{\tt cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 cdimageyouwanttoburn.iso}
\end{enumerate}

instead of clicking the bullet button or asking a paperclip to make a list. It's all a matter of what you want. There are plenty of lean, mean systems out there. Don't bitch about UI slowness unless you are willing to use a plain-text console with "screen" "mutt" and "elinks" as your main applications.

Nobody give a fig about optimizing

[winkydink]

'memory is cheap'
'disks are fast'
'processors are fast'

nobody cares about optimizing code anymore.

Usere experience unchaged .. nooo way

[iMaple]

But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years

Now that really depends on what you would call 'user experience'.
Compare a file manager 15 years ols (PC Tools had one right .. for DOS) to the KDE/ Gnome file managers (Ok MC looks the same still :) ).
Compare pine to Thunderbird.(though I still use pine on my old laptop :) )
Compare Usenet clients or say Lynx to Firefox,
Compare Doom 3 to Pac Man .
Comapre the fancy graphics on OS X to Win 3.1 or whatever OS Mac had then

No Sirrr I say the user experience of performance HAS changed. Maybe not directly proportional to the Proceessor speed increase (due to code bloat ?) but still its much much better. Thats my $0.02 .

Heh

[FiReaNGeL]

I think that the article writer just realized what a lot of computer buyers don't : CPU speed != more performance, ESPECIALLY when you look at graphical display and Word processing (at least he didn't include "web surfing speed").

Where are my CPU cycles and memory going on my AMD 3500+ and 1Gig 400MHz DDR Ram? Most of the time, nowhere. 1% CPU usage, commit charge 150 megs / 1 gig. Honestly, if you don't use CPU intensive apps, there's a limit to the 'improvement' you can expect in 'graphical display' and 'word processing' speed. But sales rep will tell you otherwise, for sure.

Stuff running in the background

[grahamsz]

Generally (at least on my less used windows box) i have most of the following running most of the time....

1) VoIP Client
2) Messaging Client
3) Word Processor
4) Multiple Web Browsers
5) Email Client
6) Probably some graphics or photo editing tool
7) Something playing music

In addition there are various other background processes like desktop indexing, things watching for my digital camera being plugged in, smart start stuff...

Linux is probably worse since i keep Apache and often Tomcat running all the time.

Back in the day, this was never how it was done. You'd optimize config.sys to get the absolute max amount of free conventional memory.

Multitasking has improved to the point that many users probably run close to 100 processes at any point in time..

prstat here says i'm on a system with
Total: 3741 processes, 6739 lwps

Fair enough it's a shared box, but that scale was impossible a decade ago.

Re:Code Bloat

[Rei]

More than just code bloat: disk access speeds combined with the increase in size of everything (for "richer content", "more features", etc).

With a lot more files, a lot larger files, etc, your performance at file access (and disk caching) will decrease unless you can increase the throughput and decrease the seek time/latency of data access from the disk.

Back in 1998, most PCs were shipping with 5400 RPM hard drives; I bought a used 10k rpm drive for 200$. Nowadays? Most PCs are still shipping with 5,400 RPM drives, and 10k RPM is still good performance (although not the best out there - although, mine back then wasn't top of the line either).

Disk sizes are scaling up wonderfully. Disk access speeds are not. The same holds true with RAM.

It's not just that...

[bonch]

A lot of people like to wax nostalgic about the good ol' days when things were faster, all the while ignoring the featuresets implemented today. The fact is, yesteryear's code wasn't as advanced or featured. A word processor from ten years ago may have been pretty damned fast, but today's word processors load dictionaries to spellcheck your document and grammar as you type and import graphics.

Windows 3.1 may have been incredibly snappy, but it also lacked propery memory protection, wasn't 32-bit addressed, and didn't provide an intuitive interface. Also, more advanced typography (anti-aliasing) and filesystem indexing services like Spotlight come into play, as well as all the important system daemons running in the background that are now considered stock.

It's not that things aren't getting any faster because of bloat. It's because as power increases, the ability to add new modern features to the original experience is utilizing that extra power, just as it should.