OLS: On how user space sucks [LWN.net]

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 21, 2006 10:22 UTC (Fri) by tcabot (subscriber, #6656)
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

This reminds me of the time a few years ago when Alan Cox ran Nautilus under strace. He didn't like what he saw:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2001-August/...

I find that developers (at least here in the US) tend to have very fast machines and upgrade them frequently. Do you think that this might be one of the causes, i.e. the developers might not notice these issues since their HW is so fast? If that's the case then I'd expect OLPC to provide a lot of useful feedback. Running in a resource-constrained environment tends to make efficiency problems more "itchy" than they are on monster HW.

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OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 21, 2006 11:20 UTC (Fri) by Viddy (subscriber, #33288) [Link]

Just for sh*ts and giggles, and because my laptop makes lots of fan noise when it uses lots of processor power and gets hot (its a Compaq Evo n1020v P4 2.4GHz) I thought I might run strace on various processes running on a stock ubuntu install to see why it didn't idle at 300mhz and buggerall cpu usage.

Wow. I'm not a particularly good coder, but my understanding is that if it polls like a large chunk of the desktop programs do, generally, you've done it wrong. I know of the sleep() and usleep() functions, and I'm pretty sure I could figure out callbacks.

It seems that the cups daemon responds with http headers several times per second to none other than... gnome-cups-icon. I mean, It's nice to see printers appearing when the cups daemon finds them on the network, but checking multiple times per second?

The update-notifier spits out craploads of file reads per second. I'm pretty sure that my ubuntu repositories don't change _that_ often :)

The upshot of this is that I'm now irritated enough to start downloading source and submitting patches.

The part that gets me is that neither of my machines are that slow, and yet, under a linux desktop, it feels like I'm trying to push mud around with my mouse. I want my desktop to feel snappy.

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 28, 2006 17:45 UTC (Fri) by sandmann (subscriber, #473) [Link]

> Wow. I'm not a particularly good coder, but my understanding is that if it polls like a large chunk of the desktop programs do, generally, you've done it wrong. I know of the sleep() and usleep() functions, and I'm pretty sure could figure out callbacks.

Uh, are you saying that using poll() is wrong?

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 21, 2006 15:10 UTC (Fri) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]

All the time since I read that article I have wondered if anybody ever cared to fix this.

I guess the same will happen to me with Dave's findings, unless LWN some time publishes a follow-up titled "user space doesn't suck no more" ...