24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
It seems many comments missed the point. The article is not about how bloated modern software is, how many useless features and programs are wasting CPU cycles for pointless jobs, etc. (<i>Yes, modern software is bloated, for this reason, I&#x27;m using the MATE desktop on a minimum Gentoo installation, but this is not what the article is about.</i>)<p>It is describing how web browser, a piece of software with extremely high inherent complexity, interacts with the memory allocator of the operating system, another piece of software with high inherent complexity, combined with a rarely used feature from Gmail, can trigger complex and complicated interactions and cause major problems due to hidden bugs in various places. This type of apparent &quot;simple&quot; lockup requires &quot;the most qualified people to diagnose&quot;.<p>These problematic interactions are unavoidable by running fewer &quot;gadgets&quot; on the desktop environment, it can be triggered and cause lockups even if the system in question is otherwise good-performing. Installing a Linux desktop doesn&#x27;t solve this type of problem (though this specific bug doesn&#x27;t exist).<p>The questions worth discussing are, why&#x2F;how does it happen? how can we make these problems easier to diagnose? what kind of programming language design can help? what kind of operating system&#x2F;browser architecture can help? how can we manage complexity, and the problems came with such complexity, what is its implications in software engineering, parallel programming? etc.<p>From another perspective, bloated software is also an on-topic question worth talking about. But instead of the talking point of &quot;useless programs wasting CPU cycles&quot;, or &quot;install minimum Debian&quot;, we can ask questions like &quot;do _ALL_ modern software&#x2F;browser&#x2F;OS have to be as complex as this?&quot;, &quot;what road has led us towards this complexity nowadays?&quot;, &quot;what encouraged people to make such decisions?&quot;, &quot;can we return to a simpler software design, sometimes?&quot; (<i>e.g. a vendor machine near my home, trivially implementable in BusyBox, or even a microcontroller, are now coming with full Windows 7 or Ubuntu desktop! Even the advertising screens use Windows 8, and BSoD sometimes, despite all they need to do is just showing a picture. same thing for modern personal computers.</i>), or even &quot;is Web 2.0 a mistake?&quot; (so we are here on Hacker News, one of the fastest website in the world!). These topics are also interesting to talk.