Pendell

is that hard disks are actually perfectly fine and usable, the real problem is that software developers no longer bother to consider their constraints and limitations while writing software

today's hot take is brought to you by installing Windows 10 on a machine with an HDD

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:28 PM

To be fair I think you can apply this to most things

"Existing hardware is perfectly sufficient for any computing task but, for reasons, software demands more compute"

Some reasons valid, some not. I don't really wanna lead this down the whole "a true scottsman programmer only programs in assembly" thing because that's not really accurate, but also damn we use a lot of fucking computer to do basic tasks and it sucks.

Pendell @pendell3/6/2024, 8:33 PM

It really is capitalism's fault though, because devs and the industry at large is constantly pushing for "innovation" aka new ways to use way more power to do the same tasks, this bleeds into even smaller things like adopting programming languages that are extremely power inefficient etc, all because if they weren't constantly forcing everyone to buy new, faster computers, then a good chunk of profit would evaporate overnight.

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in reply to @MxSelfDestruct's post:

vaporware @vaporware3/6/2024, 8:00 PM

💯 the problem was never the tech limitations

wiggler @wiggles3/6/2024, 8:02 PM

i’m curious how you would design software to work with spinning disks better? you may just be observing the inescapable fact that ssds are like 10-1000x faster than spinning disks

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/6/2024, 8:13 PM

from what I'm told/have observed, the tricks that game developers used to get games to run well off of optical media work pretty well for HDDs too;

ensure that application assets are all stored contiguously on the disk (tarballs and similar formats are GOATed for this)
don't be overambitious when cacheing stuff
minimize and combine read/write calls when possible

with tricks like this, you can improve performance a lot. you're not gonna magically make the computer run like it's got an SSD, but it doesn't have to be glacially slow either.

(glares at Windows 10 machine to my right taking 30 minutes and counting to apply updates and reboot)

SArpnt @SArpnt3/7/2024, 4:16 AM

i feel like a lot of techniques (mainly the first you listed) would only work sometimes, for certain filesystems, on hdds, and otherwise could have no benefit or slow things down. devs can do whatever they want with optical media because the data on it never gets reorganized.

maybe if the os had tooling to handle things properly for different storage mediums and use cases? but that's certainly not happening and plenty of devs would find ways to fuck that up

anywhere i look online i still see tons of advice that only applies to hdds and would simply not work or ruin an ssd. i wouldn't want any software that isn't the os or some disk tool to try anything funny.

maybe there could be a tool to analyze program startup and reorganize the files so that it becomes one long continuous read? that would be really nice especially if you could get the whole os boot sequence into one long read

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/8/2024, 3:34 AM

in my experience/observation, the first method actually works really well regardless of FS on hard disks and SSDs alike; the point of a tarball is to concatenate a bunch of files into one large file, so that they don't get strewn about carelessly by the FS/OS; a lot of modern games do this with assets, they just don't literally use the .tar format because mmmmm yummy yummy bespoke proprietary formats

SArpnt @SArpnt3/9/2024, 3:04 AM

can't many filesystems spread single files all over the disk too? and i'm pretty sure no ssd has any sense of "strewn about" in the first place because the hardware intentionally shuffles things around to increase the drive lifespan

i mean if benchmarks say it works that's neat but i have no clue why it would work

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:24 PM

If you want to do a REALLY deep dive into this, look at what ZFS is doing under the hood. Everything about ZFS is designed to make mechanical drives work as good as possible, with a lot of queuing and optimization.

I saw a video (conference talk) about optimizing ZFS for running on high bandwidth NVMe arrays and a lot of that work was basically undoing all of the stuff put in place for mechanical drives, because modern NVMe is so fast that it's better to just blast it direct instead of say, queuing a batch of reads or writes.

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/6/2024, 8:26 PM

👀 you have my attention, what's a good starting point to read up on this?

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:31 PM

https://youtu.be/v8sl8gj9UnA

Here's the talk I saw, warning there's some major audio issues (drops out for a while, static later on) but does eventually clear.

Past that, frankly it starts getting a bit above me. Even that talk is more in depth than anything I'd actively be touching, but hopefully that's a good starting point for finding other material short of just... digging into the ZFS code lol.

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:22 PM

Modern windows on a mechanical was pure suffering, like holy shit yes that OS has zero respect for what a disk might be doing it just wants to SLAM BACKGROUND IO AT ALL TIMES MUST BE INDEXING MUST BE OPTIMIZING SEARCH (note: search still sucks)

Very very upsetting last time I encountered it.

kyle @-pegasus3/6/2024, 8:42 PM

i boot windows twice a week to run games and in my experience it's still suffering on an ssd

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:46 PM

I mean windows is suffering for many reasons but I didn't wanna get too deep into that lol

kyle @-pegasus3/7/2024, 12:23 AM

some👏OSes👏advertise👏onedrive👏to👏cope

Pendell @pendell3/6/2024, 11:39 PM

twice a week

That's probably why it's suffering even on an SSD. Windows always assumes it is your default OS so if it hasn't booted in four days it freaks the hell out and starts checking EVERY POSSIBLE THING, pulling all the updates and re-indexing every possible thing in the background as it tries to CATCH UP because being dormant for more than 8 hours is clearly a sign that SOMETHING IS WRONG, why would anyone not boot Windows every single day?

@aune3/6/2024, 8:48 PM

i dunno, this is one of those rare cases where i'm not sure

i think it was more true in the past, then SMR drives showed up everywhere because Density/cost, and now write performance on HDDs is so fucking bad I'm considering moving all my storage to NVMe

n.s.@reth3/7/2024, 2:19 AM

true! i still run a relatively older system (first gen i5, two hard drives (320+160GB), 8GB DDR3, and a GTX1050), and it’s actually pretty good… until i try to run newer software. oh well.

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/7/2024, 2:39 AM

enormous respect if you use this as your main machine

n.s.@reth3/7/2024, 3:02 AM

hell yeah i do

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/7/2024, 4:07 AM

🫡

in reply to @pendell's post:

Plum @plumpan3/6/2024, 8:35 PM

I always try to look for less obvious answers because the "capitalism fucks it all up" is too easy.

Even if it's probably true.

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct3/6/2024, 8:59 PM

it's also because slow programming languages like JS/Python are much faster to develop in, so choosing to write your application with those languages helps you beat your competitors to market… until they all start doing that too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA29p2e5fvk

Pendell @pendell3/6/2024, 11:35 PM

This is exactly what I mean, really. Companies wouldn't be panicking over "being first to market" if there wasn't a capitalist market to be first to. Capitalism breeds ~~innovation~~ new ways to rush the quickest built, cheapest possible garbage to market before the next guy.

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