On 12/03/2020 08:06, John wrote:

Why do machines with fast multi-core processors end up being
unbearably slow? The reasons must be known and easily fixable.

Depends a bit on what timescale you are talking about...

With older machines of the Core2duo era, the experience is frequently
pretty poor these days even if working at peak performance, simply
because the world of software has moved on. OS and Applications sizes
(and hence load times) and memory usage have increased vastly in the
last ten years or more. So disk performance has a big impact on
perceived speed of the machine, and old HDDs are going to suffer a
disproportionate hit. If because of the larger memory footprint you also
start paging sooner, you get a further big hit in performance. In more
recent times much software has gone 64 bit, and that again makes for
larger application sizes and in many cases memory use as well.

Increasing the RAM, and changing to a SSD can help greatly, but will not
necessarily fix all ills since CPU grunt is required for some things
that modern software expects to be able to do.

Modern usage is far more dependant on internet access speed - so poor
performance there will have a much bigger impact on system usability
than in the past.

Web content is also orders of magnitude larger than in the past - so the
memory and processing requirements for handling web pages has increased
in many cases to anything from 10x to 1000x what they were.

All that assumes the machine is running just what you want. Even modern
spec machines will slow if loaded with enough malware.


--
Cheers,

John.

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