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Obligatory XKCD: Listening[^]
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Hello all,
Some time in the last few months, I remember reading something of a rant about how difficult it was to add features to Oracle - something about having tests run for hours to days, hundreds of feature flags, causing completely random things to break, having to add hundreds of your own tests, and having to wait weeks for management approval after additional testing.
However, I can't seem to find it anymore. The only other clue I have is that I got to it through a link from the "Daily News" email.
I tried searching on the site, but I can't seem to find it.
Can anyone point me to where this was?
Thanks!
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You're looking for an Oracle rant, and need to go back months?
You're just on the wrong site. 
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I am referring specifically to a rant by a former Oracle employee about developing the database engine itself, not to a rant about using it.
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It doesn't sound familiar to me; I'm guessing it came somewhere other than the insider news.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I’ve replaced spinning hard drives (HDD) for SSDs in several computers recently and the difference is amazing. An SSD on a SATA interface is about 10 times faster than a 7200rpm HDD and about 13 times faster than a 5400rpm drive. On my wife’s 2012 laptop (Intel i3-2350M CPU running at 2.3 GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1333), I replaced the original 5400rpm HDD with an SSD and the computer is around 10 times faster. It boots in seconds rather than minutes (Windows 10 Home) and there’s no waiting for web pages to load, no pauses in videos, and so on. I’ve now done the same thing for three of her friends. Prices on good SSDs are incredibly low on Amazon right now. I’ve been using Samsung 860 EVO or SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs.
To make the swap, you typically need just three things. The new SSD, a USB 3.0 external disk enclosure and disk cloning software. USB 3.0 enclosures from Sabrent or Inaco are in the $10 range. I’ve used the free versions of EaseUs Todo Backup or Aomei Backupper or Acronis TrueImage to do the cloning. Put the new SSD in the enclosure, clone your existing drive to the SSD and swap out the HDD. A serendipitous advantage is that, after the swap, you can put the old hard drive in the enclosure and use it for backups. Total cost can easily be under $100 depending on the size SSD you need.
With GHz CPUs and memory, if you're still running off a HDD, you're probably losing 75% or more of your computer's potential.
Note: I just refurbished by own desktop computer with an Intel H270 chipset motherboard and an M.2 SSD with a PCIe x4 interface (Samsung 960 EVO). The configuration is 3 times faster than hooking an SSD up to SATA, but you need a compatible motherboard and SSD, obviously.
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matblue25 wrote: The new SSD, a USB 3.0 external disk enclosure and disk cloning software. USB 3.0 enclosures from Sabrent or Inaco are in the $10 range.
Nowadays you don't need an enclosure to clone a drive, there are usb3 cables available which will plug straight into the SSD. They make the process of cloning a drive a lot faster: EkoBuy® USB 3.0 to 2.5 inch SATA III Hard Drive: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics[^]
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Saves a couple bucks (or quid).
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Also means that you don't have to fiddle with getting the drive into and out of an enclosure.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Sure, they're awesome for ridiculously quick file access. Now price a system for a nice 32TB RAID. I suspect the spinners are still going to come out on top.
Different tools for different jobs.
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Got a point but I suspect it won’t be too long until SSDs get into that market.
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I'm waiting. Believe me, I'll be the first one to replace my big fat spinners the moment SSDs of the same size match in price.
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2 things are dead now. ICE cars and mechanical drives. More so mechanical drives but yeah, it is truly beyond anything else, the #1 speed up shop in the arm you can do for your pc today.
The greater question is this today: With laptop manufactures falling all over themselves with hybrid drives, optane memory cache, and split ssd/mechanical drive setups all because windows 10 is soo doggy slow about starting up, what the heck is windows 10 doing? Where is the outrage?
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It has to upload all of your personal data to MS. That's what takes it so long.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Where is the outrage?
I hope they are happy with who I am. I'm positively the most boring person you ever would want to know.
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first thing to do on windows is disable superfetch service, especially if you have SSD, but even on spinners it would be no longer useful [even if it did work properly].
- at startup it's supposed to load up as many of your "often used apps" into memory as can fit, problem is it's nearly always loading up important windows apps really stupid crap such as wordpad (which for me I might use once every 2 years or less) Of course it kicks out that crap when you use something like visual studio starts up, but guess what happens when you exit vs...
- theory is sound, saves loading the apps later [when used] from slow hard disks, but today, even if you are on spinners which in this case are too way fast enough, it's irrelevant
- yet MS still includes and enables it even on win 10, even if you have SSD.
- It's useless, it actually slows you down!
something else I noticed:
* windows: when I left my PC on doing nothing (say a lunch break) the hdd light would regularly flicker, every few seconds briefly and about once a minute longer for a second or more (also network activity at about the same rate)
... what is it doing??
- not saying it's all spying (this was in win 7 too), but there is that
- yes background maintenance, but why does it reload it and [re]perform the checks every time?
* linux: leave it alone and it barely ever flickers, and way less net traffic. [smart enough to leave it loaded if nothing else requires the mem, smart enough to leave it's last-run data loaded.]
short explanation: windows inner core design and yes: even a lot of it's actual kernel code, is still based on hardware from the 1970's, windows 10 is NOT a new OS, it's crap on top of an old one (that relies almost exclusively on new hardware base speed (not code) to be "better than before.")
Summary: don't blame windows for being bad, instead blame it for being VERY outdated.
for those that want something to picture:
steam engines built 100+ years ago still work fine, doesn't mean they should be [given a fresh coat of paint and] used for hauling cross continental passengers and freight though does it?
... this is exactly what you have with windows.
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Gee, if all what you write were correct and true
I wonder: How can you see that wordpad, which you might use once every 2 years, is prefetched?
I wonder: How will the computer be slowed down when overwriting pages and page table entries referring to some other application (such as wordpad) as compared to overwriting zeored entries?
I wonder: Which hardware from the 1970's affects the Windows design? And in which ways? It can well be argued that the Windows 3.x software memory management was very strongly influenced by the 386 hardware MMS, and at lest on the design level could have been put onto the 386 more or less directly. But at that time, MS was striving to make Windows available on all sorts of processors, so they abandoned essential parts of the 386 MMS in favor of a single, flat memory model that was generally available on all relevant CPUs.
What is true is that MS has taken backwards compatibility to extremes (in my opinion): Read Raymond Chen's selections of blogposts from The New Old Thing[^] - quite a few of the (sometimes rather funny) stories he tells have to do with backwards comptatibilty. In contrast to people writing open software in their spare time, MS has to support their existing customer base. As a programmer, I wished that 32 bit Windows would have a thoroughy cleaned-up API (from the 16 bit version), since it couldn't be 100% compatible anyway. We didn't get that - but we got thousands of Windows applications ported from 16 to 32 bits in a few months, because MS decided to bring the API changes to a minimum, to simplify porting. From a marketing point of view (and even more the wiew of independent software vendors making Windows apps, rather than MS itself), I can fully defend that decision. What goes on under the hood is a completely different matter.
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Member 7989122 wrote: wonder: How can you see that wordpad, which you might use once every 2 years, is prefetched?
well, look in \windows\prefetch, and there it is. I even see sidebar - which I never used and in fact disabled years ago. I'm really glad ms has my best intentions in mind loading those important apps.
Member 7989122 wrote: wonder: How will the computer be slowed down when overwriting pages and page table entries referring to some other application (such as wordpad) as compared to overwriting zeored entries?
Umm, it's slowed down because it's loading that say wordpad from the disk into memory, and when I exit visual studio, it loads it back again
and hence, superfetch is useless. even if you have spinners it really should be disabled. If you have SSD it's almost important to disable it. (and despite some claims it does not auto disable if it sees SSD - that's just another myth.)
Member 7989122 wrote: I wonder: Which hardware from the 1970's .... , so they abandoned essential parts of the 386 MMS in favor of a single, flat memory model that was generally available on all relevant CPUs.
glad you agree with me: "a single, flat memory model ... all relevant CPU's" which includes the 186, 286, 386..., and are they not from the 70's? so yes, it's [your words] using a single model that supports all architectures thus including 70's and thus not able to make use of optimizations of later CPU's.
yes, sure, it's for backwards compatibility, and yes for backward compat, but really what's the point? there's features of w7 and beyond the 80286 will not handle, so why leave an outdated major core function that by design of other parts of the system is actually irrelevant?? (and how can ms claim w10 is an entirely new OS when it's core is that old?).
anyway just glad we and agree and your input to further detail it for others.
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Quote: "a single, flat memory model ... all relevant CPU's" which includes the 186, 286, 386..., and are they not from the 70's?
If you had been bitching about the segmented memory of the '86 (all the way back to the 8086), I could have agreed with you. But that particular MMS mechanism that was gradually made more and more complex, from the 8086 and upwards to the 386, is what is particular to that family - and that was abondoned by MS. Well, there is no real way to turn off the segmentation, so what they do is to define a single 4 GB (in 32 bit mode) hardware code segment, a single 4 GB hardware stack segment and a single 4 GB harware code segment and put them on top of each other, and then build a software mechanism for doing a very similar segmentation. (Btw: 286 and 386 are designs of the 1980s, not the 1970s, and there never was any 186 Windows.)
If you are talking about flat memory models: "thus not able to make use of optimizations of later CPU's" - I wonder what you are referring to here - which mechanisms that is. And I wonder how other OSes make use of these mechanisms in ways that Windows doesn't. I know of several single-architecture OSes that make use of mechanisms particular to that specific architecture, but that is much more in the area of interrupt and exception handling than in memory management.
Flat, unsegmented memory certainly did not arrive in the 1970s - it more or less stems from the days of ENIAC. In that sense you could say that all OSes have their roots in hardware from the 1940s. If that is too far back for you: Another widespread OS is based on a 1965 vintage 12-bit architecture: It may well be argued that this architecture is the root of its very strong single-isolated-segment paradigm: Splitting up 4096 words into a collection of separate but cooperating segments would be rather impractical. The segments simply had to operate alone, and processes couldn't access more than its own segment, because there wasn't room in memory for two segments at a time. Today, there are workarounds, that definitely have the appearance of Workarounds, for this: The main paradigm is still that a a process has a single segment, as a single isolated box, communicating through flat files only - even for such a basic concept as synchronization.
Now I checked windows\prefetch at this machine, and you are right: There is a file named Wordpad.exe-...pf there. But first: It hasn't even been read, for about three months (and occasionally, I do start WordPad - last time may have been three months ago). Second: The file is 21 kB, while the "real" Wordpad.exe is almost 4,5 MB. So the prefetch directory most certainly does not hold the full .exe file - most likely some sort of metadata. In any case: Presence on disk does not show that the entire executable file is loaded into RAM, as you say.
IF it was, it might slow down the boot up time by a few MS. A SATA-600 disk can deliver 4,5 MB from a single NTFS extent in something like 10 ms. If that 10 ms slowdown bothers you a lot, feel free to be bothered a lot. (Anyway, I doubt that is actully happens). When you leav VS, and claim that is it reloaded again: Disk I/O is managed by DMA circuits. The CPU starts the transfer, and then goes on performing other tasks while the transfer is taking place. If you, within 10 ms after having closed VS start another huge file access on the same disk, it may have to wait for whatever remains of that 10 ms transfer. Feel free to feel bothered by that as well - and again, I doubt very much that Wordpad is actually read into RAM. Even if you had actually been using WordPad immediately before starting VS: Unless you are short on RAM, with noticable paging, chances are way above zero that the WordPad pages were still present in RAM with no need to read them in again.
I strongly suspect that there are aspects of the superfetch mechanism that you have not fully grasped. Either not at all, or misunderstood.
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too much to read
whatever on the memory management, MS still supports ancient [in fact incompatable] processor architectures, far from optimal. It's that simple!
... oh yes superfetch does slow you down, I start VS, it loads it into mem, exit VS, it loads some useless crap into mem, I start VS again, AGAIN it has to load it from disk AGAIN. I'm not griping about the loading of the useless crap, it's the forced RE-LOAD of the stuff I do want (i.e. when I go back into VS).
Standard caching practice is to leave whatever was there last (i.e. in this case VS) until space is required, not burn it and load up some other crap just for the sake of it.
Now do you get it? Even if it's pico seconds there is NO way doing what ms does could NOT BE SLOWER. Again it's that simple.
Member 7989122 wrote: I strongly suspect that there are aspects of the superfetch mechanism that you have not fully grasped. Either not at all, or misunderstood.
odd you should say that as it was you who asked me how I could find out what superfetch was caching, the answer [that I gave you] was pretty simple was it not, seemed you were the one unaware of this.
if you had bothered to learn at least a little about the technical details [not just the the ms bullshit] you wouldn't have had to ask me such a silly question.
Sorry, but you've attempted to insult me twice now, and it's twice I've proven you wrong.
Ask me to learn more??? It's you clearly demonstrating the lack of knowledge and understanding.
Ever written microcode? Ever written an operating system from scratch?
You're welcome to come back and discuss further when you've caught up to me, until then no point continuing further; goodbye.
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Sorry, pal, you are not getting through!
Even from the start: That "too much to read" is a clear announcement: "I choose to ignore those facts that I choose to ignore". Fair enough, but that does affect your credibility, if you like it or not.
I observe that you do not want to go in details about your alleged limitations caused by the old Intel processors memory model, nor the claimed extensions not exploited by Windows. You imply: well I really have noting more to be said about that - forget it!
You have brought no more "proof" of superfetch loading of irrelevant applications into memory, except you have seen some similarly named metadata disk file in some disk directory. Great "proof, isn't it?
No, I do not "get it", that "useless crap" is loaded. Firt: I don't se it happen. Second: Sometimes there are resons for things being done. I am responsible for a toolchain management system where I thousands of times (well, at least several hundreds of times) have had to explain to its users why it is necessary to re-read the information from the file system, again and again: Something might have changed. Without exception they leave my boot with an "OK, so that's why! ..." Sure, well behaved applications announce changes, but we have a load of applications that do not, so there you have it!
There are two levels of complaint: The first one is "I do not want my PC to do this - it slows it down"
The second level is: "Look here: Now I have disabled function X, and my PC complets its tasks i X.yy second. Let's try again with function X enables: it completes in Z.yy seconds. It is repeatable: We can run it five fimes with X enabled, five times with X disabled, and is consistently a.xx seconds faster with X disabled."
My problem with such claims is that some obstacle always makes it impossible to compare the two alternatives, "changing the build plans to the other alernative is too much work, we know that it is how we say it is!". That is not neceessarily at the outset, but when the "obvious" differences do not show up, the explanations why they are still there, to full extent, even if the comparative test didn't reveal them because it was not properly done ... Right!!
There is no indication whatsoever for WordPad loading 4.5 MB into my RAM of my machine. Your "proof" to the contrary is a disk file which on my machine is half a percent of that size and hasn't been read for three months. What proof!
Actually, I have been microcoing a 2901 procssor. And I have designed the interrupt handling system as hte core of an ARM based system. So I know what system software is about. And then I also know that even though you may be competent to control the signals going to various hardware circuits. it certainly doesn't prove that you are an expert of, or even understand the basics of, hight level buffer management, memory management and the like.
So: I feel free to turn you or anyone else down when you make statements in an area that you do not master, statements that you cannot defend with well founded arguments. If I turn down your arguments about cache management, and you claim: That's an insult, becase I knonw the microcode of the VAX 730" - well, then I accept that you are insultetd. It does not make me accept you as a guru on cache management.
If you feel that I have insulted you in a professional area where you indeed do have professional expertice, I beg you to rebut my argument on profesional grounds.
If you feel incompetent to do that, feel free to feel insulted.
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Other than gaming laptops where with the biggest AAA games weighting in >100GB makes just a small SSD not a reasonable choice, and until recently the pricegap between a 240gb SSD and 1tb HDD and a 1tb SSD (good sata type) being rather large (currently with google top result prices it's about $50-75) I'm not really seeing split SSD/HDD storage anywhere and haven't for a while; and as small as the pricegap has gotten I'm half expecting that sort of split storage to disappear in next years mid/high end gaming refreshes. Other than as an option in configurators for semi-custom setups I haven't seen optane anywhere.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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matblue25 wrote: 4GB of DDR3-1333
There's your problem. Too much swapping.
What you maybe should have done is just upgrade the memory to 8 or 16GB -- it would probably have had the same effect on the speed of the device.
Also, if you're using virtual memory a lot, you'll wear out the SSD pretty quick, so upgrading the memory is recommended, anyway.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Probably not. Very few home PCs use 4 GB of RAM actively. Resource Monitor may indicate that you have > 4 GB "in use", but that covers all the data accessed by all the applications you have opened since bootup, and not closed again. And all the services that run once ever hour - or once every forthnight. If you give a command (or a service is woken up) that require a 5 ms disk access, that is a delay of 5 ms, nothing more.
Right now I have running a 4-tab firefoc, full Outlook, Lync, Docker, 123 services in "running" state (includeing Java, a Docker engine, Traps antivirus, remote login service, ...), 9 mounted network disks, Resource Monitor ... Still I am below 5 GB total RAM usage.
None of the processes are real memory hogs (with the possible exception of Firefox), none of them come even close to half gig of memory use, and out of that, three fourths have not been accessed for minutes. You very rarely have umpteen programs actually executing on your PC; they are waiting for some external event - timer, network input, or your interactive input. The waiting for an event doesn't go faster with more RAM, and you usually entertain only one program with your input at a time.
Looking at the page fault count might fool you: To make sort of an LRU memory handling, pages are taken out of the page tables long before removed from memory. When a page fault occurs, the memory handler will see that the disk is still in memory, and do not need to re-read it from disk. So "page fault" does not imply "disk access".
On most home PCs, making them really spend a lot of time on swapping (/paging) requires you to set up a rather artificial boquet of simultaneouly processing programs in a way that you never do in when routinely using the machine. You could then set up a test where the PC was chewing ahead with no interactive input to prove that going from 4 to 8, or from 8 to 16 GB RAM, in an extreme program mix could complete a huge task somewhat faster. But if it is non-interactive, who cares about a few seconds?
More RAM is a nice placebo, and it is "almost free" nowadays. So if you have a friend constantly complaining that his PC is slow because he has got only 4 GB, and you know that is not the real cause, then you tell him to buy more RAM just to stop his complaints. As a placebo. Besides, this is an excellent placebo so strong that it works even if you don't believe in it: You get rid of all your friend's complaining, even if you don't believe that more RAM has any affect at all.
Disclaimer: There are cases where computers are hogged down in paging/swapping - but that is plactically always in professional applications, not home PCs. Very few home PCs do FEM processing, weather forcasting or similar tasks.
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I just bought a laptop couple of weeks ago but it'n not with SSD, i am planning to install my self one. Thanks for sharing it here, now i will surely install it in that machine. 
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