7 ms·

That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer

That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25. The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.

tristor 22d ago
It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware. A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality. But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets. This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.
- seki285 22d ago
  I think this post deserves a more in-depth discussion around the topic, I'd love to learn more.
  - treebeard901 22d ago
    Using the above post example of a delay when typing in a terminal, the path that text takes from the keyboard to the screen is much more complicated. Some of it comes from security changes. Back in the day everything had direct memory access. And the memory layout wasnt randomized by things like ASLR. Not that this specifically should impact terminal input but it becomes a factor with memory access more generally. Now you have to deal with user mode and other security barriers. Drivers can still get direct hardware access but then as has been mentioned you have the bloated software layer with stuff like electron. Increased concurrency has a latency cost as well and we have many more things (usually unnecessarily) running today. Im sure there are many more things that add up to focus more on throughout over latency as mentioned above.
HenriTEL 22d ago
Did you try to disable animations? There's an option in the developers settings.

tristor 22d ago

It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware. A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality. But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets. This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.

seki285 22d ago
I think this post deserves a more in-depth discussion around the topic, I'd love to learn more.
- treebeard901 22d ago
  Using the above post example of a delay when typing in a terminal, the path that text takes from the keyboard to the screen is much more complicated. Some of it comes from security changes. Back in the day everything had direct memory access. And the memory layout wasnt randomized by things like ASLR. Not that this specifically should impact terminal input but it becomes a factor with memory access more generally. Now you have to deal with user mode and other security barriers. Drivers can still get direct hardware access but then as has been mentioned you have the bloated software layer with stuff like electron. Increased concurrency has a latency cost as well and we have many more things (usually unnecessarily) running today. Im sure there are many more things that add up to focus more on throughout over latency as mentioned above.

HenriTEL 22d ago

Did you try to disable animations? There's an option in the developers settings.