Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines | Hacker News Reader

Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines

blogsystem5.substack.com

198 pointspolyrand128 comments

Disk activity indicators, the ramping up of fan speeds, or the flashing of network activity lights used to tell me when my computer was doing something I wanted it to do. When my computer started (or stopped) doing a bunch of things unexpectedly it was an indication of compromise or of an application gone rogue.

These days, any number of people feel entitled to use our computers whenever they like for whatever they like. The company who makes your mouse driver might want to phone home, then silently download and install a bunch of software you never asked for. The maker of your OS sends themselves a steady stream of data about what you've been doing on your computer: which files you've had open recently, what software you have installed, etc. With countless people using our devices for their own benefit on their own schedules it's nowhere near as useful to know when your computer is doing "something" because it's always doing something.

Personally, I've always preferred the soft whir of fans and the clicks of old hard drives. For a time they were a wonderful source of white noise for sleeping and I would sometimes find myself waking up if a computer I'd tasked with something overnight suddenly fell silent because it encountered a problem. I'd get up, fix the issue, and go back to sleep comforted by the sounds of my computer working away for me once more. Today our machines can be always silent while never being still, and they can spend at least as much time working for others as they do for us. Indications of activity can still be useful to me at times, but they're never comforting the way they used to be.

Like the times of early dialup modems you could tell what was going on by the sound of modem, then came cable as things got faster. You would know your computer so well from that extra feedback from disc lights, noise of the disc head moving, and just a microsecond change in the noise on startup had you in investigation mode. Then things got faster and all those tactile feedbacks of knowing the health of your system got lost. Though in the early days, such feedback was the best AV you had.

But as life moves on, and you get older, you start to appreciate the times as a child when your grandparents would reminisce the same things, and you would think old folks crazy as your baseline of life and technology is still being set at a fast pace, that eventually slows down. Until, you're telling tales of whirring media and 5MB hard drives the size of a washing machine and costing more than a house at the time. Which is just crazy talk to kids today.

That's nostalgia, which is always a good positive comfort go to place as you get older. I'm equally somewhat reminded of the Star Trek TNG Episode - Relics when Scotty is in the holodeck simulating his Enterprise and tells Picard how he knew the Enterprise, his Enterprise and how fast it was going and the health of the engines by the feel and vibrations in the deck plate and none of that in the future he is on Picard's Enterprise. Great episode.

Picard: The first vessel that I served on as captain was called Stargazer. It was an overworked, underpowered vessel, always on the verge of flying apart at the seams. In every measurable sense, my Enterprise is far superior. But there are times when I would give almost anything... to command the Stargazer again.

This is why people should/can opt to use free and open source software under their control.

I am not worried about my Fedora/Debian/Arch/whatever systems collecting personal data.

I am not worried about GrapheneOS scooping up the location information from my phone.

Home Assistant developers don't want to know when my lights and oven are turned on.

It's a decent starting point, but it's an assumption that they're not collecting data (because it is discoverable if it's written in the code); however is not always true.

You should check the source code for every project you're using as much as possible to really ensure that there isn't anything obviously nefarious like telemetry included, because in some cases it's still there.

See Sunxi's Linux SBC backdoors on git for one of many examples of undocumented insecure or privacy-breaking code. In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

Google’s Go has telemetry?

You complaints read like my list of reasons I switched to running linux and use open source software everywhere I can. My mouse doesn't need a bespoke driver let alone one that phones home or have administrative privileges to install software. My OS shuts up and doest force updates at random times to force me to beta test them for their enterprise clients, or shove ads in my menus and searches or upload my files and file histry to their cloud. I can still figure out what programs are talking to the internetat a given time.

Totally agree with this article, there are no immediate consequences to bad CPU bound code. I am seeing the consequences of this at my current position as a Senior Engineer at a startup where a lot of things were written naively, pushed the burden to cloud costs to keep pushing out features.

Something that really taught me to look for things like the "HDD Light" or Fan speed was starting my career in embedded systems. 16 bit MCUs really let you know if you are trying to much on them. They also let you know if you toggle the wrong pin by going up in flames.

The disconnect between your fingers and what actually runs the code is becoming greater and greater for newer developers. It will be interesting to see how computing power keeps up with bad code (it had been doing a good job so far).

CNA I ask how did you switch away from embedded?

Programmers don't (can't?) dog food[1] their code because their development machines are Intel Xeon or AMD Threadripper monstrosities with abominable GPUs to match.

Most apparent are the web programmers, most of them assume everyone has 10gbit fiber connections with 16 core CPUs and 128GB of RAM to feed to Chrome. And then they wonder why their shit runs like shit in the real world.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

> their development machines are Intel Xeon or AMD Threadripper monstrosities with abominable GPUs to match.

Not all developers. In my entire career, I've never had a development system that was better than the average consumer machine. And, honestly, I wouldn't want one that was, for the exact reasons you state.

Are you certain about that? I’d wager that the average (median?) consumer machine these days is a a smartphone, and not an especially high-end one at that.

Yes, I'm sure. I'm not counting smartphones in this at all, though, because I don't develop apps for smartphones anymore (it's not a market that interests me). By "average machine", I meant a budget laptop or tower.

Yes, but if you need to compile something, isn't it nice to have those threads?

If your software takes that much resources to compile, you may already be on the wrong end of this equation

That's a very weak "may". Different languages and compilers vary in speed by orders of magnitude, when fed similar code with similar running speed.

I've never been terribly bothered by compile times in general. 90% of my work is with compiled languages, and (in most languages) incremental compilation does a great job of keeping compile times low. Even for large projects on slow machines, I rarely see compile times exceed even a minute. More usually, compiling just takes a few seconds.

Sure, you do occasionally need to do a full recompile, and if the project is very large then this can take a nontrivial amount of time, but that doesn't really happen often enough for me to be bothered about.

If the project is of really significant size, or if the compiler/language/code structure is such that incremental compilation can't give you significant gains (or isn't even possible), you may need more grunt of course.

> Most apparent are the web programmers, most of them assume everyone has 10gbit fiber connections with 16 core CPUs and 128GB of RAM to feed to Chrome

Facebook marketplace. I don't know how you can make a grid of images max out a 5800x, but they've managed it. A markedly inferior product to every one of the classified ad competitors they've squashed out of existence.

That is one advantage of being a firmware engineer. In my case, this code runs on exactly one machine (usually) so whatever performance I get is very indicative of what the customer experience is like. My dev machines are usually just unfused versions of whatever hardware I'm working on.

Programmers developing webshits should really be forced to add 200ms to all their roundtrips. It’s worrying how many people assume everyone is 20ms from their “edge”, and openly advocate on HN for “new” technology that requires a roundtrip on every single state change, unwinding twenty years of client side advancements.

As someome who doesn't live in the US I appreciate the nod. Unless the company has edges in the southern hemisphere, every single widget has a round trip of 2-300ms. Something like Jira with it's cascading react components was a jumbling absurd mess until all the roundtrips completed, which could take 10+ seconds. A liftime from a UX perspective.

Funny to have issues with Jira in the southern hemisphere since they're Australian, you'd think they would have figured that issue out.

I would say rather that code badness has been keeping up with computing power increases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law (May he rest in peace.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

I wonder if this phenomenon can be generalized under one law, because clearly it pops up anywhere humans are concerned.

100% percent agree with the article.

Its funny how we all differ in respect to what kind of feedback we find acceptable from our computers. I turn off all audio notifications. I MUST have a hard disk light. I need graphs running at all times. I like to hear fans spinning up when the CPU/GPU is hot. And I never want to have my computer talk to me. ethernet jacks MUST have link and activity lights.

This is the way.

I don't need the graphs, but I'm with you on turning off audio notifications and the need for HDD/Ethernet/etc. lights. And I, too, never want my computer to talk to me, nor do I want too have to talk to it.

Right?

My keyboard came with RGB. I don’t care for it but I let it light up if any kind of lock is engaged and it glows a low red colour beneath the keys that I click.

That’s the only step I go beyond you. And the only reason I did it was because no lights at all for the keyboard meant cycling through every possible setting.

My computer is a machine. Its beauty is in its functionality. Being able to look at it and know what it’s doing is important.

what do you mean by "any kind of lock"? All I can think of in this context is caps lock. Or scroll lock, may it rest in peace.

Num lock.

Ah don’t forget num lock.

Once every 2 years I gotta do data entry with something that can’t be OCR’d for whatever reason and I need those keys.

> I gotta do data entry with something that can’t be OCR’d for whatever reason

I regularly use the numpad, often in the context of a throwaway spreadsheet where I'm doing some napkin-math. (Or sometimes a tiny Python script, depending on what needs modeling.) Not true "data entry' in the "finish these X pages" sense, I guess.

Wait, what's the use case in the modern day for NumLock off? Given all the keys the numpad becomes then, are duplicated as real keys just to the left anyway. NumLock toggling is the most quirky IBM PC hangover in my humble opinion.

I always felt that RGB was useless but after installing OpenRGB it's growing on me. My keyboard now lightly glows with a color indicating CPU temperature. I'm able to turn the whole board into a hard drive light.

Long-term istat menus user here too, for the same reasons. I've found and removed so much crap through the years because I could notice it. I've fixed so many dumb issues because I could see it was doing absurd amounts of pointless, unexpected work.

And for istat menus specifically: it's super stable and they're extremely fast to support new OSes, unlike many fancy menubar apps. Easily worth the money for me.

Unfortunately, these performance monitors can make the computer use more power, by waking up every second to update the display, and therefore preventing the computer from entering deeper idle states. It's the same reason the default on-screen clocks no longer shows seconds by default, and blinking text cursors often blink for only five seconds or so before becoming static: waking up every second to update the screen can be costly.

Of course, a performance monitor which updates less often can avoid that issue (for instance, atop by default updates every ten seconds), but most people who run these graphical performance monitors want second-by-second updates.

Developers are being asked to use them. It doesn’t matter if developer machines use a bit more power to save magnitudes more over the lifetime of all client use of the resulting, more efficient, product.

Are CPUs really staying asleep for more than a second when the screen is on? I doubt that.

Back in 2009, Matthew Garrett measured a blinking cursor as costing 2W of power consumption. Presumably it'd be less of a big deal now, but it does show that UI updates on a low frequency can cost watts.

https://lwn.net/Articles/317923/

Computers have come a long way. My M1 Studio only draws about 40-50w under heavy load (like, running AI models or a full screen 3D game).

With modern CPUs and OSes most of the cores are parked most of the time. For example right now only 2 of my 16 cores are active.

Has anyone actually measured the increase in power use between no use, 1 second, and 5 second updates? (also, some indicators are more costly)

I have used iStat Menus for a couple of hours and it made a sizable dent on my battery life, so I uninstalled it right away. macOS is a bit sensitive about being woken up constantly. Maybe it won’t be a problem on a desktop machine, but running these on Mac laptops is not free.

Note that iStat Menus have its own set of daemons it uses for keeping tabs on system usage. It doesn’t just hook to the kernel via interfaces and display stats.

Most of laptops still have fans these days. They just spin less because the machine is much more powerful. Maybe reading 100MB/s is not as concerning as 30 years ago? My M1 macbook still gives me fan noise occasionally, like when I forget to exit an infinite loop. But I appreciate that most of the background tasks would not need my attentions anymore.

Back in the days I didn't enjoy the LED or the sound of disks. They disrupted my workflow and not always actionable. I mean, I don't really need to know that the machine is working hard on reading the optical discs I just inserted. I will take action if the reading slows down my foreground program.

I totally feel this. Since I got my m1 air I have to constantly monitor my laptop's cpu and ram usage, because otherwise I get no feedback at all of what is going on in my computer. I never had the concept to constantly monitor these unless something was wrong. If something was overtaxing the cpu, I would hear the fans. Now, sometimes I only notice that it has gone hot to the touch after quite a while. If I messed up with memory management or forgotten some dozens of tabs open while running memory-heave computations, the OS would start lagging. Now, mostly I can only notice if I check the swap memory used.

If it isn’t negatively impacting performance why do you care? I bought RAM for it be to used, not to sit staring a big number in the Free column in task manager.

SSD wear maybe. Battery drain?

It sounds like they are writing software, so they probably care because their target users don't all own M1's. That was the point the article was getting across.

When personal computers became just another consumer electronics gadget, they ceased being tools optimized for their prior primary use cases.

It's no surprise this has resulted in removal of things like status/activity lights. The same thing happened to automobiles when they went mainstream. Now you have to get an enthusiast/sports car just to get oil pressure and voltage gauges, and even then they're likely to be nerfed to non-linearity so they're always in the same place until so far outside of normal that it's too late to prevent any negative consequences.

I'm looking at you, rental Turbo Passat coolant gauge that stayed perfectly still until overheating in Death Valley accompanied by an instantaneous jump from Normal to pinned in the red on the temperature gauge I was attentively monitoring. smh.

Another example is the original MX-5's oil pressure gauge that was so active you could use it as a proxy for engine RPM, which is normal. The next generation "improved" this with one that stayed stationary in the upper range once the engine had any pressure at all, compressing all "normal" pressures to that needle position, effectively turning it into an oil pressure switch+light in analog needle form.

I'm still waiting for a PC/Laptop manufacturer targeting specifically this market. Clicky keyboards, hardware connectivity switches, status/activity lights galore, i.e. a rebirth of the OG classic ThinkPads w/modern SoCs/displays/batteries. They'll be expensive, but so are Porsches, I can't be alone in wanting this...

Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a crash..." And then blue screen of death.

Back when I had a PC which was somewhat capable of playing games I would play Left 4 Dead in cooperative mode. You play along with three other players, and navigate the levels attempting to move from one safe room to another, fighting a hoarde of infected. The game attempts to keep the players moving by adding "special" infected, which have different abilities and are good at forcing the team to leave the current area.

One of the special infected was the Tank, which is quite strong and can throw chunks of pavement. I always knew when he was coming because my PC was kind of weak and the fans would go nuts about 30 seconds before he made an entrance. The other players were surprised that I had a sixth sense when it came to knowing when it was happening.

Too much HDD noise was also a really good indication that your computer ran out of memory and stuff is being moved into swap. I remember some occasions where I would alt-tab from a game in Windows 98 and my computer would freeze for half a minute (while doing concerning HDD noises) until I regained control of the desktop.

On the Commodore 64, you knew your floppy was bad when the drive would reset itself, slamming the read/write head against the stop repeatedly. “tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRAAAAAAP” ... eventually knocking the head out of alignment, requiring a hardware fix (not a difficult fix, but tedious). Copy protection was notorious for causing drive knocking, so people often used cracked versions of games they purchased just to prevent it (they tended to load much faster too).

The 1541 doesn't have a track 0 sensor, so they send it 40 step commands to move it back to 0. If it wasn't already on track 40, it will just bump against the stop repeatedly. I've never heard of it damaging the drive though.

My own 1541 never actually had problems, but it was folklore on BBS's, and I saw it happen with my brother's drive. Was easy enough to service though, just loosen a couple screws, nudge the motor a teensy bit, run a diagnostic disk, and repeat ... many many times. They might have just been prone to misalignment anyway, but the knocking couldn't possibly have helped.

It's a commonly cited source of head misalignment. I'm not sure if that claim is true or not though.

Heh, we need an external device, maybe something like a USB LED screen that shows CPU/disk/io usage outside of the regular desktop, much like we see on some fancy CPU coolers these days. At least for me I don't tend to keep things like usage utilities on screen and pinned to the top as they'll block the other things I'm doing on even multiple monitors.

If someone was clever about it, you could probably even feed data back to the external display via SSH from remote boxes.

Oh god I can see it already in the apple store. Another dongle to display the "super duper pro user" data. 499,- thank you very much XD

Apple ships better tracing and profiling tools - for free - than anyone else.

In Windows land there's a library someone made for ahk to access CPU etc APIs, I used that to make a basic CPU activity/mem usage UI.

It's underneath other windows, but usually visible off on the side.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4J-DTbZlJ5I

Ok, that was way cooler than expected.

Yup that's amazing... At some point in the past I considered building my PC inside an old amp but the amp only had two vumeters and nowadays CPUs have many cores. GP's YouTube link looks really great.

Oh my god I love it.

This might be a dark hole for me, I'll end up with an office dressed up like an Soviet reactor control room.

Or a beeper/clicker for disk accesses/CPU usage, so you can learn to "feel" your machine like the days of old.

I have no nostalgia for noisy PC fans and hard disks.

One thing that was cool though, was way back in the C64 days. If the SID chip's volume wasn't set to zero, then background sounds would come out of the speaker that were directly related to what the computer was doing. It was neat because it kind of sounded like an ethereal pipe organ. But you could "hear" basic things like complex computations vs. a short loop. I think disk drive data transfers were recognizable, but it's been a while.

Modern GPUs can do this too, noticeable in the coil whine that sometimes happens. Always happening for me with Unreal Engine editor for some reason, and sometimes in games. Performing GPU-heavy simulations also makes it noticeable on my 3090ti. Somewhat nice that I can hear how many FPS the simulation is doing by the intensity of the coil whine.

My office monitor at my last workplace let out distinct whine, when a certain spreadsheet was open and expanded to beyond a certain portion of the monitor's real estate. It was maddening.

And, of course, the spreadsheet I used most often at that job.

My 486 was in the basement where my FM radio could barely pick up my favorite station. It had an analog tuner, and I found that if I tuned just off to the edge of the station, I'd get distinctive patterns of interference, just enough to tell how busy the bus was, while still being able to hear the music.

It was enough to turn off the monitor and kick back during a long modem download, and the repetitive ticking of what I presume was the UART ISR, could've been the PATA chain, would tell me it was still in progress. When the ticking stopped, the transfer was done and I'd turn the monitor back on and get back to work.

https://github.com/exelban/stats is a solid open-source alternative to istat.

You still needed something to compare to, of course.

When I first started using Linux (kernel 1.2.8, I believe?) it took 8 hours to compile a kernel on my 486dx/33 with 4MB of RAM.

The endless hours of hard disk thrashing only told me that my computer was working very hard to compile lots of lines of code.

It was only years (?) later when I upgraded to 16GB that I realized this should only have been taking minutes.

You mean upgraded to 16MB? Or was it much later?

486DX/33 implies 4 MB and 16 MB are correct.

yeah, that.

I remember being transfixed by Aussie50's clever hack of wiring his 12V CPU AUX power connector to an old school mechanical ammeter. Probably not a great idea today due to the intense power transients modern machines draw, but the idea of physical instrumentation on machines has always seemed like a good idea to me, if space is available. I like my gpu's coil whine, I can hear if it's running a misconfigured job. Human brains are amazing multi modal pattern matchers, it's good to let them do so.

The only noise my desktop makes nowadays is the coil whine. I find it more annoying than the clicks of a hard drive though due to its frequency.

Fair. It's a bit of a screech for sure. If it weren't so useful for my specific usage patterns, I'd probably try to quiet it.

On some MacBook models (Intel), there was a sensor for this that you could access with the iStat menus app (among other ones) that did the same thing - it measured the power/current at "CPU Computing Highside", or in other words before the main ~12V bus that powered the CPU. Was interesting to compare the CPU package power and this figure to see the "efficiency loss" in the VRMs.

Tangentially relevant but since you mention Aussie50... brings back the memories. At the end of primary school, I used to watch Aussie50 on YouTube a lot, and discovered a number of excellent engineering channels they were associated with. He was very good at explaining how various machinery worked, and YouTube videos like these played quite a role in getting me interested in tech.

Sadly there won't be any new videos anymore, but hopefully the channel stays up/someone has a backup of it.

I credit him with giving me the push to just be what I am, that it's ok to have a garage full of strange machines just to enjoy and learn. That was huge for my young self, who hadn't seen anyone else in tech in their life.

And don't worry, I've got Aussie50's entire channel backed up, myself. I'll post it if it ever goes down.

Desktop PCs (and mini-PCs) still have the blinking HDD LED.

Since the first time I got a second HDD, I was always disappointed that there wasn’t a dedicated LED per HDD. NAS cases actually have that.

Yup! And if it is beefy enough, the fans will kick in from time to time. (Strangely, it gives me great joy to see 30 cores under 100% load and hear the fans hum in accord.)

Most consumer SATA drives actually report their activity on pin 11 of power connector, which can be easily hooked to individual LEDs (as seen on drive bays in server racks). SATA standard even has schematic diagrams for proper making of those blinkenlights. Unfortunately, most (probably all) factory-made wired connector plugs are made with a single piece of metal forming pins 10, 11 and 12 cramped onto the ground wire, and soldering or other contact isolation work is required. Soldering male and female connectors with full number of pins together to add a breakout is probably the easiest way.

I’ve found stats [1] to be a great open source alternative to the iStat Menus system monitor app mentioned in the article.

[1] https://github.com/exelban/stats

I always wanted more feedback, so that even in the mechanical disks and lots of fans era my desktop has always shown more data with GKrellM plus some of its plugins, namely multiping to show the status of my NAS and router, and bubblefishymon for a funny but very effective and immediate way to show that system load is growing suspiciously before fans start screaming.

http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/

As for servers, embedded systems or any other situation where a traditional monitor can't be used, cheap external LCD modules showing system stsatus can be interfaced via serial, USB or parallel ports through lcdproc.

https://www.lcdproc.org/

One of the biggest "steps" I experienced was when SSD'd first came around. Suddenly "slow db queries" ran at light speed instead of taking 5+ seconds. It was quite physically noticeable and now it's not. You have to run EXPLAIN on everything to be sure.

Going back a bit further, I fondly remember my dad yelling "did you PARK the hard disk?" whenever he heard me power down the old TRS80 with "state of the art" 5 meg HD physically bigger than my first PC (which had a 40meg HD - dad was jealous). If you didn't manually issue a park command, the read/write head could flop around and cause damage if you bumped or moved the HD.

Don’t worry, queries can still be written to bring a 96 core Xeon with 1 TB of RAM to its knees.

I’ve had to calculate maximum possible data transfer rates for RAM to convince devs that their query was the issue.

“This has an index, it should be fast!”

“OK, but you’re hitting 800 GB of pages…”

> The obvious example are Macs: they haven’t had hard disk LEDs for a really long time, and since the M1, they are silent and cold too.

And if the fans on your MacBook Pro do happen to spin up when you hit ‘run’ you know you’ve made something at least O(n^3)

Maybe its because I work on embedded firmware, where detailed logging is occasionally at the expense of device function, but I find the absence of blinking LEDs really unsettling.

I've repeatedly removed and replaced the batteries on my thermostat's remote temperature sensor, because there's no visual feedback that its otherwise working, and my house was cold.

The absence of "working" lights when I know I'm doing a processor-intensive operation on a computer is similarly unsettling. Its not directly actionable feedback, certainly, but it can be a proxy for a more directly actionable, but more onerous to implement or use, feedback mechanism.

At my previous job all circuit board first revision review meetings I would never shut up about how I wanted as many LEDs on GPIOs as I could get so I could stick various Linux LED triggers on them. CPU, disk access, heartbeat, network, panic, etc. SUPER helpful for early debugging of “what the heck is going on now?” situations that are common on early prototypes.

A comment left on the post mentions in days of old you could detect viruses via drive sounds...

I have a 2u server sitting in a closet running a lot of things, it sits over a pool of spinning rust, one day I happened to be in the closet and hear the disks getting hammered, no alerts about any network hijinks, no login alerts or high volume traffic coming or going so I log in and it turned out to be a friend I had given a shell to because he wanted to learn linux and he was messing around with dd... His account now has an alert on login so I don't have a stroke.

Not exactly fun but did bring back memories.

This is exacerbated by the fact that most developers have nice, beefy machines compared to most people who will be using their products. Though we've also experienced the opposite in the case of server-side code. Improved a lot of little inefficiencies in our server-side code base through efforts to keep it possible to run on small VMs on developers' local machines. Things that we'd never notice on the monstrous 52-core 128GB of RAM infinity SSD servers, but show up quickly when you're giving it 2 cores and 4GB in a VM.

There is a school of thought that developers should have hardware that is a generation behind the cutting edge, to make sure that their output will perform really well in the real world, on the latest hardware...

Can't do it in the modern day with any front-end "technology" -- I remember finding after converting a FE build to Docker that it would die every time with a strange error. Turns out the Docker VM couldn't (maybe still can't?) make use of virtual memory on the dev machine, and there weren't 10GB of real RAM to spare. Let that sink in for a moment how building a frontend web app takes 10GB of RAM. (No this wasn't my code, or choice of dependencies). I hate the js ecosystem.

Ah, such rose-tinted glasses!

My first PC - much like the one pictured in the story, had a fan that was spinning 100% of the time, because most PCs then were too primitive to have a temperature sensor that controlled fan speed. And you couldn't hear the hard drive because the fan was so noisy. So much for these performance indicators!

The only thing audible above the loud PC was when the hard drive died, and spent all its time making nasty mechanical clicking sounds. But since the computer had locked up by that point, it wasn't much of a help!

MenuMeters on Mac solves this problem for me: you get a customizable set of little system load graphs in the menubar which can be glanced at to notice anything off.

I came here to mention MenuMeters as well. It's the closest thing I can find to those beloved X window system load indicators of yore.

>The computers of yesteryear had this little feature known as blinking LED lights .They also had this other feature called noisy disks and loud fans

You just described my reasonably current water-cooled PC (except the disks - it only uses SSDs). I have a direct die water-cooled ryzen 7950x and 2x 3090 gpus. Normally my PC is completely silent. The massive radiator surface is fine for passive cooling until about 300W. I can tell the cpu is doing more than usual, because I can hear the water pump (normally I can't hear it - yes I need to add rubber feet, then it'll be silent even when ramping up) in addition to all the hardware monitoring I do.

Also leds are extremely important for troubleshooting. Anyone who built an am5 PC knows the pain of "memory training". Having leds on the MB to tell you what is going on is very useful.

As for the typical "developer laptop" in my current place of work (and 3 previous ones - all fortune 300 companies) developers use either Windows or Linux laptops. Only managers use macs. How is this relevant? Well, because all these laptops have fans and you can tell when they're busy.

For working with remote machines that I need to ssh into I've found mobaXTerm[1] to be a very useful terminal emulator. It has an optional remote monitoring feature that shows the usual stats as a small bar under the active terminal window.

It's a windows only application though.

[1] https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

This article reminds me of how fucking stupid it is my laptop has no markings around the keyboard to indicate where ports are. It didn't take many instances of hearing a usb connector or microsd card scrape against the aluminum for me to break out colored paint pens and mark everything myself.

I swear I saw on LGR a CF card adapter that made noise with a little motor to simulate the sounds of hdd access.

Not an edit:

Found it!

https://youtu.be/IZKttBr2Y8g?si=ij3eFlmtrpIsYrkf

My computers still have audible fan noise when they get hot. It's hard to believe others don't too, except perhaps water cooled rigs or something exotic.

Despite this, and in case I can't hear it for some reason, I have load and temperature gauges on my monitors at all times.

But hard disk noise, I completely forgot that was a thing until fairly recently something caused me to remember it. I don't miss the noise, but it was definitely a good canary or just a sign something was going on. I wonder what gauge I can add to my Linux system as a replacement for disk noise?

Since the theme is noisy feedback, I have to mention this old project: "Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring your network with sound" (https://web.archive.org/web/20220930162655/peep.sourceforge....), discussed here some time ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017337).

When I used to use macOS on Intel laptops I would be hit, every so often, by gpg’s smartcard pinentry getting stuck in a 100% loop. The only thing that ever notified me of it was the fan turning on!

The 3 best words an engineer cam ever utter: "hmm, that's interesting..."

Not good for the project schedule, but great for better understanding the system you are working on.

I like multiload-ng for this: https://udda.github.io/multiload-ng/

Essentially, a blog about metrics visualization. The hdd led is one artifact of a point in time of Moore's law, but long gone.

The embarrassment of riches of gigahertz quad core cpus available for 20 bucks or less... So much excess labor that can sneak by.

With some approximation of AI, those scifi stories of the distributed rogue AI living on ample excess cycles gets slightly more plausible every day

If you are using Windows and don't know where to start then you can try Rainmeter.

LiteStep folks liked it. Personally I never bothered with it, because, well I could hear it, lol, but I do miss LiteStep dearly.

https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/getting-started/

Rainmeter is quite pretty, but the displays (skins) seem to only work on the desktop.

The author of the article has iStart on the menu bar, so the performance indicators are visible even when application windows are covering the desktop. The GNOME extension system-monitor-next[1], as mentioned in the article, is also similar.

Does anyone have recommendations for something similar on Windows?

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3010/system-monitor-n...

You can put a skin on top of the Windows menu bar as well so that it's always visible, making the taskbarc transparent

(also I think it has a topmost option for some skin, so not only desktop)

Oh, there were a ton of these utils back in the days.

I can't vouch for any of them because I don't use them, but just a quick search for "cpu utilization hdd utilization in the taskbar" shows a lot of options, eg https://entropy6.com/xmeters/

Or even running the default Task Manager so it would be only in the notification area and not in the taskbar: https://superuser.com/questions/666597/always-show-windows-c...

XMeters used to be very good, but does not work on Windows 11.

Task Manager is very limited, unfortunately. You only get CPU usage in the notification area.

I'm surprised that it's not standard to show some basic performance metrics when using an IDE's debug tooling. It's already aware of the processes that it's spawning so it should be able to keep an eye on them. Just enough information for you to go hmmm and open a profiler.

if you're using linux I highly recommend conky_seamod:

https://i.imgur.com/oMPG7IO.png

https://github.com/maxiwell/conky-seamod

And if you are a GNOME user, tophat is a very similar alternative to what the author suggests:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5219/tophat/

There are plenty of ease to use libraries and tools to instrument and profile your code today.

If people don't use them, if they don't care about the performance, it is on them, not in the lack of noisy spinning disks and machines behaving as if they were hair driers.

My keyboard has RGB LEDs that are under-utilized. It would be a fun project to write a service that sends resource usage stats to the keyboard and some custom firmware to “render” it on the keyboard

> these monitors only help if you develop on your local machine—a workflow that’s becoming exceedingly rare.

Is it? Do I belong to the minority of developers that write code on their local machine?

Maybe they're referring too VM hosted development environments or cloud function systems. But indeed it would surprise me to learn that remote is the norm, I don't know anyone developing on remote dev envs.

Can't get with the recommendation to run perf monitors. These displays irritate me with their constant movement. When I want to know what's up, I run dstat, htop, and friends. Most of the time, my screens are calm.

Performance requirements should be covered by tests. Relying on the dev to notice is a form of manual testing. Nice if regressions are discovered that way, but don't rely on it.

On the flip side, I once had a mainboard where psu noise leaked onto the audio path. The little chirps were only audible when it was quiet and gave me nonintrusive feedback on the activity level of the hardware. I still miss that board.

Whoa, I had a motherboard that had the same behavior. It was a long time ago, I rocked a Core2Quad at the time, but the motherboard had this issue that the audio in the headphones jacket would pickup both when the CPU was stressed (I guess due to power consumption) and additionally some mouse movement would also do small little noises - this forced me to use the keyboard more often, learned a lot of shortcuts at that time.

I remember that computer wasn't like this from the get go but started exhibiting this, after an year with it, I used it like this for at least three more years and then got a new one and the old one was converted to a media center.

They have LED cpu cooler displays now that you can stick anything you want on it including disk/mem/heat/whatever. They are really amazing.

Awesome app indeed, well designed, and beats the hardware led indicators since it lists apps that are misbehaving (and not annoying like hdd noise)

I actually like when I could hear my HDD... I could more easily find out when my computer was doing something it was not supposed to.

The sound of a failing hard drive gives me no joy.

It must be a conspiracy involving Microsoft. :)

For years, noisy hard drives with blinking lights served to highlight the difference between thrashy Microsoft operating systems and smoothly running, performant alternatives.

Linux system monitor chart gadgets on the top/bottom panel kind of gives this back

Don't worry, my laptop fans spin up to high whenever I run Google Meet.

For anyone interested, I wrote an Mac app to provide a disk activity indicator in the menu bar - https://ttkb.co/soft/drivelight/

It doubles as a way to quickly eject and access mounted volumes as well.

Can we please stop obsessively monitoring (and $deity forbid, alerting on) low level metrics such as CPU and Disk I/O? Sure, they should be recorded as they are useful for troubleshooting and looking for bottlenecks. But relying on them for most software is trying to figure out if you should get a speeding ticket by looking at the tachometer.

CPU usage being high doesn't really tell you anything. You may suspect that there's an issue if you are familiar with the system, and you have only one system to worry about. It's definitely not OK if you have a 'modern' architecture and a fleet of machines running a distributed system. There's a whole lot of noise and you can't tell if traffic has increased, if someone pushed inefficient code, if there's a cooling problem and CPU is throttled, if a "batch" process started, or a million of reasons.

And even if it is high, and it is an anomaly(anomaly detection on those metrics can be useful at times), is it causing any issues for your customers? CPU usage can't tell you that.

Every piece of software has some work to do. What is that work? Figure that out and monitor that. Golden signals on the relevant metrics and you'll be in a far better position. Did the error rate increase? Are we getting higher response times? In that case it doesn't matter what the CPU metric says – it could even be lower than usual if there's a bottleneck somewhere else – it is a problem that needs to be addressed. You can then use the other metrics to confirm, or try to isolate the problem. But they should be supporting information, not your main diagnostics tool.

> In a project I worked on, our development builds started writing about 80 MB of log messages per second to disk.

Well, there you go. If you just look at disk I/O you'll see that it is high. But if you track metrics from your logging system, you'll be able to immediately see _why_

Datadog (no affiliation here) has a good blog that set me on the right track: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitoring-101-collecting-dat...

By all means monitor those metrics on your work laptop - very few people are going to bother running prometheus in their dev machine and setting up alerts for third party apps. But for the apps you are responsible for? Figure out, from day zero, what metrics you should collect for your app and monitor those instead.

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