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0 pointsjws15y ago0 comments

I was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so)

  Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball.
  Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app.
  Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball.

If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever.

Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?

0 comments

nuclear_eclipse15y ago

Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?

Because 90% of those cycles are spent in other processes while your kernel is waiting for your blocking I/O to finish, and 5% or more of the rest are taken by the kernel to let other tasks run. </pedantic>

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse