| The unbearable slowness of computing | 2006-04-12 01:20 7 comments |
 by Flemming FunchMy new iMac is in the mail from the Apple store. So now I can allow myself to complain about my old one in the meantime. The last couple of years my computer has been a 12 inch aluminum powerbook. Which is a handy little machine, very convenient for taking on the road. And if you plug in a big screen and a keyboard, in principle a perfectly fine thing to have on one's desktop. But the last year it has just gotten increasingly unbearably slow. Whenever anybody asks me about that happening to their computer, I always deny that it is even possible. Computers don't just get slow from getting older. On Windows maybe. It might be full of spyware, or you haven't defragged your disk or something. But a Mac? There should just be no good reason for it. Well, various reasons compound. Everything very gradually requires more and more resources, and suddenly the computer that was super-fast a couple of years ago seems like it isn't moving at all. Like, Firefox has tabs, and I somehow can't seem to live without 30 or so different pages open in different tabs. A number of which will nowadays do some kind of Ajax and Javascript thing all the time, or there's some Flash or whatever. All of which uses memory and processing power. And I have an editor with another 20 or 30 open documents, and ICQ and iChat and Skype, and the calendar, and TextEdit, and a few terminal windows. I think that is all quite modest. I don't even dare try to have iTunes running, let alone iPhoto, or Word, or various other things I'd have reason to use. Of course it is running Apache and MySQL and various other things under the hood, but none of those seem to be much trouble. Mainly it is Firefox and ICQ that uses up the resources, and an annoying HP printer driver. Oh, and OSX nicely allows several people to be logged in at the same time, and we're a bit low on computers right now, so a few more things running in another desktop. And this Powerbook only has room for 640MB or memory, which it has of course. But which nowadays is pitifully little. When it has a lot to do, like just having Firefox open, the fan starts running, which somehow slows things down even more. There's nothing worse, when you have a lot to do, than your computer being, like, 10 times slower than you are. You type something and it appears 5 seconds later. You click on a window and a spinning beachball hangs there for 10 seconds before anything happens. It is like when you're used to always-on broadband internet, and suddenly you're on a dial-up modem. You suddenly become keenly aware that you maybe should have arranged things so that there wasn't such a bottleneck, but you can't do it before you're back on your normal connection, and when you are, you forget all about it. Likewise, when everything is slow, you can quickly get the idea that you maybe should have arranged things so that the computer had much less to do, but since it is slow as molasses, you give up doing anything with it other than the most basic and needed stuff. 23 years ago my IBM PC 8.77MHz, 128k, with dual 360k floppies was lightning fast. I never ran out of memory. I have 500 times as much memory here. Why, oh why must I suffer? Well, I mainly wanted just to complain. But also remind myself, before I get spoiled again by a fast new computer, that there's plenty of opportunity for making many things more efficient. Like, why do I have so many browser windows open? Well, there's gmail, there's a dynamic home page, there's a feed aggregator, there's several admin pages for sites I need to pay attention to every day, there's a page with graphs and monitoring information for my servers, there's a couple of blogs, a couple of member areas. That's 10 already. For the rest, if there's site with information I need to do something with, why don't I just put it into a bookmark list or into delicio.us or furl? Well, I do, but those are all more cumbersome to save to and find something in than just having it open. Windows need to pop up, stuff need to be saved, the page needs to reload, etc. Still too many steps, and I can't arrange things the way they make sense for me. So, just a reminder to myself that it is a good idea to come up with better and faster ways of organizing stuff, even if one can buy a faster computer every couple of years. |