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Category Archives: Rants
Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, Symbols
Tagged dawson's first law of computing, Quadratic
18 Comments
Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been no announcement, and the documentation has … Continue reading
Posted in Environment, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Rants
Tagged time resolution, timebeginperiod
48 Comments
O(n^2), again, now in WMI
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged complexity, ETW, O(n^2), performance, WMI
46 Comments
Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at the bottom. … Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants
Tagged handles, leaks, zombies
81 Comments
What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance
TL;DR – the phrase “90% faster” is interpreted by people in two different ways: 90% less time The speed (ops/sec or km/h) is 90% greater I strongly prefer #2 but due to the ambiguity this phrase should never be used. … Continue reading
The Spoils of Law (Moore’s Law)–a New Laptop
I just got a new laptop (Lenovo P51, four-cores, eight-threads, 32 GB RAM, multiple drive bays). My old machine was more than six years old so it was probably overdue. I wanted to record some of the reasons for the … Continue reading
A modest proposal for a more natural KB
I recently wrote a blog post saying that I thought Windows Explorer should use the more natural base-10 meanings of the kB/MB/GB/TB prefixes, instead of the base-2 meanings that are a few percent larger. I convinced nobody. I was told, … Continue reading
Base Ten For (Almost) Everything
It’s 2016 and Windows still displays drive and file sizes using base-2 size prefixes. My 1 TB SSD is shown as 916 GB, and a 449 million byte video file is shown as 428 MB. That is, Windows still insists … Continue reading
Home Network Printer Setup That Works
Whenever I add a network printer to one of my Windows computers at home I end up with a reference to a hard-coded IP address. That means that the next time my home router reboots and assigns a different IP … Continue reading
Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also waste more compute power than I would … Continue reading
