plumpan

Plum

@plumpan

  • he/him

I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes.  

 

50/50 chance of suit pictures end up here or on the Art Directory account. Good luck.

 

Be 18+ or be gone you kids act fuckin' weird.

 

pfp by wackyanimal

 

I tag all of my posts complaining about stuff #complaining, feel free to muffle that if you'd like a more positive cohost experience.

 

 
Art and suit stuff: @PlumPanAD

 

 
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plumpan
@plumpan
MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct
MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct

today's hot take

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

plumpan
@plumpan

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.

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MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct

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)

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SArpnt
@SArpnt

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

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MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct

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

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SArpnt
@SArpnt

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

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plumpan
@plumpan

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.

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plumpan
@plumpan

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.

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plumpan
@plumpan

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.

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pendell
@pendell

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?

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aune
@aune

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

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reth
@reth

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.

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