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 :)

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.

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

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Now I could barely fit a word document.

And how much of that bloat in Word is useful information?

If I open word, type the letter 'a', and save the document, it's a 20K document.

If you type 'a' 2000 times, it's still a 22K document.

What the heck is in that other 99.9% of the document?

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.

On complexity, code bloat and user interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Seebach points out that "computers are, in fact, doing more than they used to. A lot of the things computers do are fairly subtle, happening beneath the radar of a user's perception. Many functions are automatic and, as discussed in last month's column, you could probably do without some of them."

This recalls an analogy drawn by a recent Economist article. Unlike most automobile analogies popular among Slashbots, this one is actually rather appropriate: "By the 1930s, ... the car had become more user-friendly and ready for the mass market. ... [T]he makers' increasing skill at hiding the technology from drivers ... meant that cars got hugely more complex on the inside, because most of the tasks that had previously been carried out by drivers now had to be done automatically. This presented drivers with a radically simplified surface, or 'interface' in today's jargon."

Given this lesson drawn from history, I disagree with Seebach's conclusion that "the worst is probably over" in terms of code bloat and complexity. Computers still have a long way to go before they can approach the ease of use and stability we demand of every other consumer appliance in our lives.

The aforementioned article requires a paid subscription to view, so in the interests of convenience, I'll reproduce it here.

--

SURVEY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Now you see it, now you don't

Oct 28th 2004
From The Economist print edition

[Image]

To be truly successful, a complex technology needs to "disappear"

THERE has never been anything quite like information technology before, but there have certainly been other complex technologies that needed simplifying. Joe Corn, a history professor at Stanford University, believes that the first example of a complex consumer technology was clocks, which arrived in the 1820s. Clocks were sold with user manuals, which featured entries such as "How to erect and regulate your device". When sewing machines appeared in the 1840s, they came with 40-page manuals full of detailed instructions. Discouragingly, it took two generations until a trade publication was able to declare in the 1880s that "every woman now knows how to use one."

At about the same time, the increase in technological complexity gathered pace. With electricity came new appliances, such as the phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison. According to Mr Norman, the computer-design guru, despite Mr Edison's genius for engineering he was a marketing moron, and his first phonograph was all but unusable (in fact, initially he had no particular uses in mind for it). For decades, Mr Edison fiddled with his technology, always going for the most impressive engineering solution. For instance, he chose cylinders over discs as the recording medium. It took a generation and the entry of a new rival, Emile Berliner, to prepare the phonograph for the mass market by making it easier to use (introducing discs instead of cylinders) and giving it a purpose (playing music). Mr Edison's companies foundered whereas Mr Berliner's thrived, and phonographs became ubiquitous, first as "gramophones" or "Victrolas", the name of Mr Berliner's model, and ultimately as "record players".

Another complex technology, with an even bigger impact, was the car. The first cars, in the early 1900s, were "mostly a burden and a challenge", says Mr Corn. Driving one required skill in lubricating various moving parts, sending oil manually to the transmission, adjusting the spark plug, setting the choke, opening the throttle, wielding the crank and knowing what to do when the car broke down, which it invariably did. People at the time hired chauffeurs, says Mr Corn, mostly because they needed to have a mechanic at hand to fix the car, just as firms today need IT staff and

Nobody give a fig about optimizing

[winkydink]

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

nobody cares about optimizing code anymore.

Re:Nobody give a fig about optimizing

[Rorschach1]

Nobody except embedded programmers. My biggest project of late runs on an 8-bit, 8 MHz CPU with about 7k of Flash and 192 BYTES of RAM. Not megs, not kilobytes, but bytes. That's equivalent to less than three lines worth of text. And the code's written in C, rather than assembly, so while it's easier to maintain, it takes more effort to make sure it stays efficient.

I think all programming students should have to code for a system like this. It gives you a MUCH greater appreciation for what the compiler is doing for you, and what the consequences of simple changes can be.

What are they talking about?

[brian0918]

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

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.

A few things

[macklin01]

Some good things that have eaten more memory and cycles (all of which have improved the user experience, as opposed to what the summary states):

1 Programs that check your work as you go (e.g.: autocalculate on spreadsheets)

2 More help dialogs, things watching for cameras, and whatnot to smooth the user experience.

3 More use of IM and other software in the background much of the time.

4 Services running so that it's faster to sort and search files, open your favorite programs, etc.

In short, lots of stuff running to make your experience smoother, even if it doesn't look like it's doing much more.

Some bad things:

1 More viruses, etc.

2 The mandantory virus scanner that has to run in the background all the time because of (1)

3 All the crap adware that installed more than it used to be.

These are just a few of the trends I can think of . -- Paul

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.

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?

[zCyl]

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

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: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)

I can't work 2^(years/1.5) faster...

[nick_davison]

I haven't had to set an IRQ or DMA setting in years. I've not had to mess with himem or any other arcane memory configs and boot disks, restarting my entire system each time I want to run a different game.

Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.

I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.

And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.

For all those reasons, I'm more than happy that my 2^(years / 1.5) faster PC "wastes" all of those extra cycles. And that's before we get on to things like built in spell checkers and real time code debugging as I write it.

I don't want a 2^(years / 1.5) faster experience. I want all those cycles put in to making things work closer and closer to how I just expect them to work.

I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.

So, before saying the cycles are wasted:

Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.

See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.

Those cycles aren't wasted. Sure, we do the same basic tasks but we do them with vastly more flexability and don't have to waste days of our lives wrestling with configs to do what we now consider simple tasks. That's where the speed is.

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.

Re:Not Lazy.

[Cee]

If you have the entire contents in memory you can be assured of not skipping if there becomes contention for the disk.

Well, the process can still be paged out. So you don't really gain anything from doing that.

iTunes on the mac is famous for not skipping no matter the system load, guess why?

Decoding an mp3 file is not a heavy task, even a 486 CPU would manage that. And Winamp hasn't skipped on my computer either, regardless of load. So I don't think it has anything to do with pre-decompressing the music.