{"id":244,"date":"2006-06-08T01:32:35","date_gmt":"2006-06-07T14:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/06\/08\/reacting-to-the-unresponsive\/"},"modified":"2006-06-08T01:32:35","modified_gmt":"2006-06-07T14:32:35","slug":"reacting-to-the-unresponsive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/06\/08\/reacting-to-the-unresponsive\/","title":{"rendered":"Reacting to the Unresponsive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 12 months, I have been getting more and more frustrated at how slow<\/em> my machine sometimes gets. It has taken me a while to pin-point what my objection is.<\/p>\n

Today I found the words.<\/p>\n

As my computer gets faster and faster, I am finding that the CPU is less frequently the bottle-neck – it is far more likely to be the disk-drive or network I\/O. After the last CPU upgrade on my home machine, I marvelled at how many days it was before I saw the CPU hit 100%.<\/p>\n

Of course, occasionally I’ll do some processing work that is CPU intensive – I run a video-processing batch job each week that takes several CPU-hours to complete. However, my day-to-day work doesn’t tax the processor at all.<\/p>\n

However, in this day and age of ubiquitous CPU power, moderately fast networks and plentiful memory, my tolerance for unresponsive software<\/strong> has plummeted.<\/p>\n

I never again want to see “Not responding” in the Windows Task Manager. I never again want to see an unpainted window, waiting for a refresh. I never again want to hit a Cancel button on a progress dialog repeatedly wondering if it will ever cancel. When I elect to close an application, it should close NOW!<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I know writing real-time programs is harder than batch programs; I’ve been there. I don’t care. I am showering the developers in the luxury of sufficient resources. I don’t complain about bloatware – okay, that’s a lie, but I am not the first in the line; I am up near the back of line, with the more patient people with fast machines and less demanding applications. <\/p>\n

In return for these luxurious resources, all that I am asking that when I select an item I get an immediate response. It don’t demand that it finish<\/em> the operation quickly, but I do demand that it respond<\/em> with feedback quickly – and if I am not happy with the rate of progress, I demand that it can be aborted<\/em> quickly.<\/p>\n

I am as mad as hell about having a machine using only 10% CPU and 10% RAM being too busy to refresh its windows, and I’m not going to take it any more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past 12 months, I have been getting more and more frustrated at how slow<\/em> my machine sometimes gets. It has taken me a while to pin-point what my objection is.<\/p>\n

Today I found the words.<\/p>\n

I am as mad as hell about having a machine using only 10% CPU and 10% RAM being too busy to refresh its windows, and I’m not going to take it any more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}