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from the perhaps-providing-prompt-prompts-prompts-perceived-performance-primacy dept.
Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us would not: He decided to test a whole slew of computational devices ranging from desktops built in 1977 to computers and tablets built this year. And he learned that that nagging sensation was spot on—over the last 30 years, computers have actually gotten slower in one particular way.
Not computationally speaking, of course. Modern computers are capable of complex calculations that would be impossible for the earliest processors of the personal computing age. The Apple IIe, which ended up being the “fastest” desktop/laptop computer Luu tested, is capable of performing just 0.43 million instructions per second (MIPS) with its MOS 6502 processor. The Intel i7-7700k, found in the most powerful computer Luu tested, is capable of over 27,000 MIPS.
But Luu wasn’t testing how fast a computer processes complex data sets. Luu was interested in testing how the responsiveness of computers to human interaction had changed over the last three decades, and in that case, the Apple IIe is significantly faster than any modern computer.
https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 30 2017, @08:16PM (16 children)
Void is great too. It's Arch Linux for adults with the runit init system. I have a T440s with the original SSD in it, and it takes about 6 seconds to go from BIOS to my display manager. Runit is faster even than OpenRC let alone SystemD.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday December 30 2017, @11:48PM (13 children)
Thank you for that tip. Rolling release, systemdless, awesome. The only drawback, and I know I'm getting backed into a corner, is Void needs a minimum P4. I still support some live servers running P3 cpus. Don't laugh- they're fast at everything but php, and low power, and it's not my choice, but I am proud of how well they run. Maybe I'll get the Void sources and compile for P3...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @01:16AM (1 child)
P3? That's close to 20 years old! What kind of services are they doing?
I have a Katmai in storage ... Kept it as gold.../1999, still work fine.
Cheers.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:00AM
Dual CPU! 2003 vintage. One machine runs WordPress on LAMP for Internet, Samba for LAN, etc.; another runs Windows Server 2003, right now just file sharing CIFS, but used to run print and IIS (sometimes I turn ftp on).
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 31 2017, @03:01AM (6 children)
Oh, wow, you still have running PIIIs? Coolness. I built my first machine right when the P4 and Thunderbird CPUs came out (and thankfully I went Socket A rather than 462, eeeesh...). For a while the PIII was outperforming the P4 clock for clock, so if yours still work I can see them being suitable for light duty server stuff :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:15AM (5 children)
Not personally- they're running a tiny hosting company I admin. Dual CPU Dell PE2450. I just published another post saying one runs LAMP, another Win 2003. There are several other machines, not running, that used to run mail host, more Apache stuff, test/development for asp.net, etc. Parts machines!
I used to run P3s personally and someday I'll build one up again (for NAS). You weren't kidding when you wrote "coolness" - they just don't get warm. Many cases have them with passive heatsinks only. Yes, for simple I/O, static webserving, etc., they're great. php bogs down (WordPress).
I have a Cyrix CPU I always wanted to use. Few motherboards would support the Cyrix. By the time I got one, I was already into P4s.
Somehow I fell into socket 462 and had several motherboards, CPUs, etc., and they seemed great for me. I still have one that's a 4th tier backup. It still works, so...
(Score: 2) by julian on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:32AM (2 children)
Are you counting case fans? You can get an i3 to run without a CPU fan if you have a heatsink and case fan. And it'll run way faster than your ancient Pentium.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:50AM
You can do that with a T-series maybe, with their 35W TDP limit, but I wouldn't try that with the non-T ones. I specialize in SFF builds but avoid passive cooling like the plague.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday January 01 2018, @03:29AM
You missed an important point: it's not my choice. If you want to talk the guy into buying new hardware, I will thank you. Or give him the $. If I push his budget he'll move everything to a godaddy and I'll lose the gig. Right now it's a fun challenge for me that pays a little.
Some of the P3s I'm remembering have case fans that barely turn, and I've never gotten them to spin up. It's been a few years since I've run any of them. The aforementioned servers seem to have 14 very noisy fans. I might have exaggerated but it's a lot. It's crazy they run full-speed- the servers have plenty of temp sensing, fan speed sensing, and should be able to control fan speed. I've never found any way to do it but I haven't tried very hard either.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by toddestan on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:50AM (1 child)
I still run a P3 in my router. As you say, they are good CPUs. The early Coppermine CPUs were under 10W at full load. That was far better than many CPUs that came after it during the MHz wars for many years. Of course, there's a lot more options now, but they are still plenty fast enough for many tasks (they'll easily run circles around the Raspberry PI). The supporting hardware is pre-ROHS and mostly before the capacitor plague so it'll last a long time, other than the IDE hard drives of course.
I had a Cyrix CPU a long time ago. They had really lousy FPU's - the one I had was a PR200+ which according to Cyrix meant it was as fast as a Pentium 200 but in reality you could forget about multitasking while playing a MP3 file (the AMD K6 was a revelation - you could play your music in the background with no noticeable impact on performance). Integer logic though was pretty fast, so it would probably do okay as a webserver - at least as far as something that old would do. The problem with trying to use one now is you're stuck on Socket 7 which means either an ancient Intel chipset or a sketchy VIA one, spotty USB support, and you probably won't have things like boot from CD so hope you have some floppies handy. Nice thing about P3-era hardware is that in many ways acts like newer hardware but slower, whereas if you go much older it's a whole different world.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday December 31 2017, @01:36PM
I still have an operational, and functional, backup server. It is a quad processor 200mhz Pentium Pro Compaq Proliant 5000 circia 1996. The only thing that has gone wrong is that mice got inside and smoked. I had to make some functional sacrifices -- but I don't need more than 512MB of RAM in it anyway... (Although the floppy drive and bootable CD-ROM have been vital).
I have two fiber ethernet cards in it, each card also has two 100mb connections. I teamed the fiber and the 100mbs to an old Catalyst 5000 switch from Cisco (with the fiber module in it) and uh if I go on much longer I'll give away the secrets of my dark lair.
It was really fast for the era, faster than data could be placed on the network until some tweaking was done on the network side. (Most modern SATA drives can at least burst that fast; SSDs can do it continuously if the therms are good, but many servers of the era were capable of performing well on 100mb networks; not 2gb teams of fiber connections. I had more bandwidth than most businesses.
My limits seemed only really came about due to age and OS support limitations. The integrated video also was 640x480 with 16 colors... adding a non compaq video card just hosed a lot and I ended up using RDP most of the time, since that supported 256 colors...
The pentium pro server could put data on the network at about 250MB/s if pushing to a few destinations (otherwise the etherchannel teaming has 1:1 traffic and thus limited it to 125MB/s or so) That is fast regardless; but it *was* on the same subnet because gigabit routing is still hard to do inexpensively and well... it didn't exist back then. (1.2gbps was the backplane on the catalyst, so to route with the layer 3 module, it had to leave the fiber module and go up to the routing module then out to another copper ethernet module to then hit the network segment to reach the host... so 600mbps bidirectionally when off the same subnet, but for one way transfers on the same subnet to a different module, it was easy to hit 125MB/s without even tweaking the frame sizes.. but I digress). Between the two servers I could get that 250MB/s due to the teaming, if I used different IP addresses and chose the right method of load balancing (it wasnt mac address based but I forget what I chose... been a while. I had a raid 0 of 7x4GB disks and could provide continuous data off the scsi controller, but if there was heavy non-sequential file access then of course it slowed down like you'd expect.)
For the longest time, I used it as a proxy server and ad blocker. I had a program called atguard that became sygate that became Norton Stupid Subscription As a Service or something (and detected the server OS and refused to install at that point...) Eventually used desktops of faster CPU power and more compatibility with modern stuff replaced the core functions... but it is still fun to poke at and see how well it formed for what it was. (And as a 5U server, it had plenty of options available for it).
It is/was faster than many modern workstations in a few ways; network traffic is of course really fast, but modern PCIe based network cards can now match it. (I doubt the system will ever see 10gb working in it due to the legacy PCI-X and EISA architecture with ISA and PCI slot support... and the OS and driver support that would be lacking...) there is no USB of any kind and I don't really want to add new things to it.
Installing Windows 2003 R2 on hardware 10 years newer (2006) has its own set of issues and I have to use 32 bit versions on everything I've mentioned. I worked out that if everything I have in it was installed when new, it would have been a server that cost over $100k. I got it and others for free that I canabalized for parts to make it when a company I did support for went out of business and were selling them for scrap by weight without concern for the value. I offered to take some of it off their hands and they let me... (I even still got paid! One of the few dot bomb success stories I have...)
One thing that may be of interest -- TFTP traffic used 100% of one CPU -- so, 200mhz pentium pro processor was at 100% utilization copying data via TFTP. The regular backup software was better at managing CPU use and spread it over the CPUs, but a "big" 600MB service pack could also spike utilization when copied. TFTP either was efficiently stealing all CPU resources to prevent a disruption to the UDP traffic, or it stunk and was badly optimized with coil whine. Not sure which...
Also, I had a number of your Cyrix CPUs in workstations I had made (eventually used for gaming). The Cyrix 5x86; the 133mhz ran like a Pentium 120, the 120mhz more like a Pentium 100, and the 100mhz more like a Pentium 75/90ish... it wasn't paired with a motherboard that worked so great and so some things worked better than others (disable the integrated sound and it was fine). Descent ran fantastic, and I was able to run it at 800x600 via command line options. It was really awesome at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @10:15PM (3 children)
Alpine might be up your alley. It was designed for routers and the like, but it runs well as a desktop distro. Arch-descended packaging system, very light, very fast, runs well on any hardware and has some interesting tools.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday January 01 2018, @03:16AM (2 children)
Yes, thanks, I mentioned Alpine in one of my posts here. I've deployed Alpine mostly for NAS and it's awesome. Package management isn't what I would like it to be. Not enough detail / info. For example after running apk update ; apk upgrade, it says there was an error, but doesn't tell me what went wrong. Can't find any useful logs. Haven't put in much effort or time on it either, it's just annoying.
In my 23+ years hands-on with Linux, I've consistently said that package management is the biggest / most important factor for Linux's widespread adoption. With Linux there are so many options, if you have good package management, you can build anything you want. I was never a huge fan of RedHat .rpm, but when yum and some of the yum gui stuff came out, then with the ability to add repositories, and some great ones at that, I was sold. But then came systemd with RH7, so I'm going to migrate away soon, when RH6 updates cease. Sigh. It may be Gentoo! I'll compile on a fast machine and rsync the servers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @09:27PM (1 child)
I used to be hardcore into gentoo, but I prefer crux nowadays. It's source based, but the packaging scripts are much simpler than gentoo ebuilds, very similar to arch's source packages. It's very easy to set up and does a lot of stuff right.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:32AM
Crux looks interesting, but is 64-bit (well, and ARM).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday December 31 2017, @12:30AM (1 child)
Wasn't aware Arch uses runit. It's one of my personal favourite init systems and it gets frequently used at $work in our embedded Linux projects.
I'll keep Arch in mind should Devuan go off rails, thanks for the info!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @12:52AM
No, Arch uses systemd. Void.