Computer Speed Gains Erased by Modern Software | Hacker News Reader

Computer Speed Gains Erased by Modern Software

hackaday.com

70 pointsjosephcsible34 comments

We didn't break Microsoft up when we had the chance to and it cost us modern computing at a retail level. When the only other viable option is an incredibly expensive machine that comes with a different OS or a free version of an OS that relies on contributions and donations to maintain, there isn't any direction to go but down.

Microsoft has been skimming processing power for year through spying and it's just that simple.

Is there reason to believe that breaking up Microsoft would somehow have made macOS, iOS, Linux, BSD, etc. leaner and more efficient?

I despise Windows telemetry, advertising, and bloat, but I've also noticed how macOS and Ubuntu (for example) are becoming ever larger and slower.

Are you using a false dichotomy to ask someone to defend an anti-monopoly stance? Your question doesn't make sense.

Are you arguing that Microsoft didn't make a leaner OS because ... BSD. Are you arguing that BSD isn't lean? They aren't even comparable in what they do, nor their resource requirements.

I was responding to PP's comment that

> Microsoft has been skimming processing power for year through spying and it's just that simple.

PP seems to be suggesting that breaking up MS would have somehow resulted in improved OS and application performance and better privacy, but that seems unlikely when we consider how most other platforms have evolved.

If you turn off desktop type effects with Linux I don't know what else people would really want.

Every window on my system moves what feels like instantaneously. Nothing feels slow on my machine at all. It literally couldn't feel more responsive and my machine is an i5 that is getting rather long in tooth.

It is the old you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.

Microsoft epitomizes the shitty aspects of monopoly. Everyone use to understand this before the Bill Gates influence campaign to revamp his image from that of Darth Vader.

> When the only other viable option is an incredibly expensive machine that comes with a different OS or a free version of an OS that relies on contributions and donations to maintain

I feel like you just threw mud at Linux distros for the way that they fund themselves, but I don't understand why.

> Microsoft has been skimming processing power for year through spying and it's just that simple.

I would rather argue that Microsoft has been skimming processing power by unnecessary virus scanning all over, by not caring early enough in proper security. Bolting it on later required virus scanning, slowing it down by magnitudes.

Also their ineffective filesystem ACL costs them 10 times.

When I was young, only MS Word and other text editor had orthography and grammar check. IIRC the orthography check was automatic, but for the grammar check I had to press a button, because it was too slow. And neither of them was very good.

Now while I type in the browser, I get automatic orthography and grammar check And gmail even make suggestions to change correct words when a typo transformed the word I wanted into another word that is in the dictionary but makes no sense. And it works even if I mix some sentences in Spanish and sentence in English.

There a re a lot of hidden features of modern software that we take for granted now.

Now compare the memory and cpu Word back then and a modern browser use.

The article is about this:

https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html

I think the primary point of this article is that it's not even telemetry and bloatware (though I'm sure those don't help either), but app frameworks. Apps that used to be written in C using light-weight ui frameworks meant for the much weaker machines of 20 years ago, are now written in all sorts of fancy, modern, sometimes cross-platform frameworks like UWP and Electron, interpreted languages, languages that require a VM, etc. Those systems are apparently a lot slower, require more time to initialise, etc.

And it's all done to save developer time, because for the past 30 years we've been saying that developer time is more expensive than execution time, and that may be true, but we haven't really considered the impact on user time.

Another factor; so many programs today either require or… at least try a network connection before they actually DO anything.

"Telemetry" above everything.

Telemetry is a strong candidate for my single most hated feature in any piece of software.

The awfulness might be mitigated slightly if it were opt-in and disabled by default, but of course it never is. It is tightly bound to dark patterns.

It's discouraging when open source software becomes infected with telemetry and dark patterns, but at least then there's a chance of forking the project and removing it.

Yes, it's almost always something with the network. You can usually tell given the pattern of the problems.

Then layer on all ill thought through corporate stuff and it's not surprising work computers grind to a halt at the drop of a hat.

I wonder if there is a way to turn off as many features in Windows as possible.

I don't need:

- printer/fax/phone drivers

- probably many more drivers

- all telemetries

- most language packs

- many system software including Edge and all those MS store apps

I think there is definitely a way to painstakingly remove these elements from my installation but I could not find an exhausted guide. -

You could take a look at AtlasOS[0]. It's a patchset made to be applied on top of a fresh Windows 10 22H2 installation, and aims to perform many of the optimizations you've mentioned. I've been using it for about 8 months without any issues, but I still have a fresh Windows installation in a VM on hand in case of some emergency situation.

They're also currently in the process of making it easier to configure with more granularity, but the current version still allows you to toggle a lot of the important options post-installation.

[0] https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas/

Thanks a lot. I'll read the doc and see if I can apply it on an existing Windows 10 pro.

That's really interesting. But given that it makes Windows defender changes etc I'm hesitant to use it. Also, why would removing edge improve performance?

Hmm looking here: https://docs.atlasos.net/troubleshooting/removed-features/

It just seems to remove a lot of security modules, out of all the bloat out there why would I want to just remove the sec modules? Also it now adds an option to include those, so all in all, it then removes:

- Some APPX and UWP applications

- Logging of Network Configuration

- Microsoft Edge and WebView

- Restore Points and System Reset

- Telemetry

- Windows Error Reporting

- Windows Updates

- Hyper-V and VBS

- Background Apps

- Disk Defragmentation

- User Account Control (UAC)

I can use https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 and https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 and https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster to do most of the debloating and telemetry tasks.

I don't see the point of removing

- Disk Defragmentation (how much does this even affect general usage?)

- UAC (?)

- Hyper-V (since this is an optional feature anyway)

- Edge (it's not that bad once the telemetry is removed from it, sleeping tabs are very good)

- System Restore Points (haven't they ever bricked a system?)

All are pretty useful, and we end up using them one way or the other

I also took a look at their scripts: https://docs.atlasos.net/troubleshooting/scripts/ ; nothing that interesting and seems to be there just to troubleshoot/fix issues caused by Atlas.

You can enable all of the things you've mentioned after applying the patch if you need them. It's mainly targeted for gaming use cases, where security is sacrificed for optimal performance.

I found that it improved the responsiveness of my system immensely, even after re-enabling most of the security features. Right after booting, I have 1GB of memory usage and only 50 total processes running, whereas a fresh install would use around 3GB of memory with 120 processes.

Of course, don't install it if you feel happy with what you can get with the scripts/programs you've linked. I've used those in the past, but they are generally more limited in scope.

>I don't need: - printer/fax/phone drivers - probably many more drivers

Those aren't a problem. Disk space is ultra-cheap, and those drivers aren't consuming any significant amount of space in the era of 1TB SSDs. Since you don't use those drivers, they're not consuming any CPU resources. Same goes with all the apps you don't use, though to a lesser extent (apps can be pretty huge). Drivers are the least of your problems.

>- all telemetries

That's a problem. It's not the only problem as far as computers being much slower than they need to be though; it's just the way modern software is written. But the telemetry does add to the problem, but more importantly introduces other problems besides performance.

You might be interested in AutoRuns (from sys internals suite of tools).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...

Web apps and their kin (Electron, etc.) also seem to consume 10-100x the resources of native apps.

Edit: I wrote the above before clicking on the link in the article which leads to....

> These apps were rewritten in Electron to offer a unified experience across desktops and to cut down costs… but for whom?

;-)

If I had ultimate power, I'd make it mandatory for all software demos to be done on a machine with a core 2 duo and 1 GB of ram. Only allowing for fancy hardware for stuff that really utilizes it. And no, moving everything to the cloud as a cheat is not allowed.

I feel like we have computers 10x faster with software 10x slower. And our day to day experience isn't that different.

I have an app bar, desktop icons, a window manager, search, and a web browser.

It's a bit prettier but I don't notice anything so different. It's as though we're running in place.

Shouldn't software and hardware get faster year after year?

It's called "Andy and Bill's law" [1] and it dates back to the nineties: "What Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

I've just moved from Windows 10 to Linux with LXDE. I'm more than happy to have 1990s aesthetics in trade off of response time. I don't need windows with shadows and rounded edges that require a GPU to render an UI button.

For some weird reason even LibreOffice works faster.

That slowdown started in my view with Word 97 and Windows ME‘s Explorer, which tried to be unnecessarily „smart“, of course at the expense of compute resources.

That (tl;dr: abstractions) and unexpected concurrency. An example story: my aunt asked me to fix her laptop because it was “dead slow”. The usage pattern was to open it, suffer through minutes of delays, do the job and close it again. The way we “fixed” it was to leave it awake for few days so that all defrag, defender, update, prefetch, etc, etc finally did their job without extra interference or interruption. It helped for a while until she received a new ssd disk which we mounted and that solved all issues. Back in the day, run loops always included some form of STI, HLT. Modern computers try to do too much in parallel without being asked to.

I think modern computers should strive to do all that stuff without interfering with the user. Load the updates quietly in the background and just prepare them to run at some quiet moment. And in the mean time, always, always always listen to the user first. Prioritise whatever the user interacts with over everything else.

Parkinson's law. Work inflates to occupy all available time. If computer hardware produces more compute time by cramming ever more clock cycles per second and running several in parallel, software workload just grows to occupy it all.

Program speed is like traffic. Build more lanes, and you will get more traffic. People will tolerate a 30 minute drive like they will tolerate a 1 second startup time.

There is no point spending resources making it faster when users would rather something that is more reliable or has greater capabilities. As long as you keep it fast enough.

The problem is that often it's not fast enough. It's always just a bit too slow, and when computers get faster, they get more bloatware processes to keep them still just a bit too slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com