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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 4 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.626s | source
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:32 UTC] No.36447314[source]▶
It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

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1. erwan577 ◴[23 Jun 23 17:32 UTC] No.36449889[source]▶
The first step to solve a problem is to measure it. Do you know of a windows program that can measure the latency of the UI of other windows apps ?

What really drives me mad is the latency of some file selection dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds.

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2. hulitu ◴[23 Jun 23 18:13 UTC] No.36450371[source]▶
> What really drives me mad is the latency of some file selection dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds.

That's why the obfuscated it and now it takes 30 seconds. (Win 10). Unless you want to save on OneDrive.

3. viraptor ◴[23 Jun 23 21:08 UTC] No.36452165[source]▶
You can get lots of good information from ETW https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

There's also Dtrace https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

4. Aerroon ◴[23 Jun 23 23:38 UTC] No.36453701[source]▶
Some file selection dialog (and explorer) issues come down to the anti-virus. I've had folders on an SSD that took a minute (60 seconds!) to load. After I added it to an exclusion list in Defender it loaded in a second.

Another one that can be slow with file dialogs is that sometimes (maybe it has been fixed now) it will try to query whether a networked drive is around on another computer. If it isn't then the call to it can be blocking your file UI.

A third problem I've noticed with file selection dialogs and explorer is that the My Computer 'folder' that contains your disks takes a long time to load. Much longer than any sub-folders on any of the drives.

I think the problem is largely with explorer.exe. If I browse those folders in a web browser the experience is snappy.