[HN Gopher] Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines
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Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines
Author : polyrand
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-01-05 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogsystem5.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogsystem5.substack.com)
| nneonneo wrote:
| MenuMeters on Mac solves this problem for me: you get a
| customizable set of little system load graphs in the menubar
| which can be glanced at to notice anything off.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, we need an external device, maybe something like a USB LED
| screen that shows CPU/disk/io usage outside of the regular
| desktop, much like we see on some fancy CPU coolers these days.
| At least for me I don't tend to keep things like usage utilities
| on screen and pinned to the top as they'll block the other things
| I'm doing on even multiple monitors.
|
| If someone was clever about it, you could probably even feed data
| back to the external display via SSH from remote boxes.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Oh god I can see it already in the apple store. Another dongle
| to display the "super duper pro user" data. 499,- thank you
| very much XD
| ChoGGi wrote:
| In Windows land there's a library someone made for ahk to
| access CPU etc APIs, I used that to make a basic CPU
| activity/mem usage UI.
|
| It's underneath other windows, but usually visible off on the
| side.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=4J-DTbZlJ5I
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ok, that was way cooler than expected.
| stavros wrote:
| Or a beeper/clicker for disk accesses/CPU usage, so you can
| learn to "feel" your machine like the days of old.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I like multiload-ng for this: https://udda.github.io/multiload-
| ng/
| esafak wrote:
| The sound of a failing hard drive gives me no joy.
| Groxx wrote:
| Long-term istat menus user here too, for the same reasons. I've
| found and removed so much crap through the years _because I could
| notice it_. I 've fixed so many dumb issues _because I could see
| it was doing absurd amounts of pointless, unexpected work_.
|
| And for istat menus specifically: it's super stable and they're
| extremely fast to support new OSes, unlike many fancy menubar
| apps. Easily worth the money for me.
| cesarb wrote:
| Unfortunately, these performance monitors can make the computer
| use more power, by waking up every second to update the display,
| and therefore preventing the computer from entering deeper idle
| states. It's the same reason the default on-screen clocks no
| longer shows seconds by default, and blinking text cursors often
| blink for only five seconds or so before becoming static: waking
| up every second to update the screen can be costly.
|
| Of course, a performance monitor which updates less often can
| avoid that issue (for instance, atop by default updates every ten
| seconds), but most people who run these graphical performance
| monitors want second-by-second updates.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Developers are being asked to use them. It doesn't matter if
| developer machines use a bit more power to save magnitudes more
| over the lifetime of all client use of the resulting, more
| efficient, product.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Are CPUs really staying asleep for more than a second when the
| screen is on? I doubt that.
| angrygoat wrote:
| Back in 2009, Matthew Garrett measured a blinking cursor as
| costing 2W of power consumption. Presumably it'd be less of a
| big deal now, but it does show that UI updates on a low
| frequency can cost watts.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/317923/
| dist-epoch wrote:
| With modern CPUs and OSes most of the cores are parked most
| of the time. For example right now only 2 of my 16 cores are
| active.
| eviks wrote:
| Has anyone actually measured the increase in power use between
| no use, 1 second, and 5 second updates? (also, some indicators
| are more costly)
| outworlder wrote:
| Can we please stop obsessively monitoring (and $deity forbid,
| alerting on) low level metrics such as CPU and Disk I/O? Sure,
| they should be recorded as they are useful for troubleshooting
| and looking for bottlenecks. But relying on them for most
| software is trying to figure out if you should get a speeding
| ticket by looking at the tachometer.
|
| CPU usage being high doesn't really tell you anything. You may
| suspect that there's an issue if you are familiar with the
| system, and you have only one system to worry about. It's
| definitely not OK if you have a 'modern' architecture and a fleet
| of machines running a distributed system. There's a whole lot of
| noise and you can't tell if traffic has increased, if someone
| pushed inefficient code, if there's a cooling problem and CPU is
| throttled, if a "batch" process started, or a million of reasons.
|
| And even if it is high, and it is an anomaly(anomaly detection on
| those metrics can be useful at times), is it causing any issues
| for your customers? CPU usage can't tell you that.
|
| Every piece of software has some work to do. What is that work?
| Figure that out and monitor that. Golden signals on the relevant
| metrics and you'll be in a far better position. Did the error
| rate increase? Are we getting higher response times? In that case
| it doesn't matter what the CPU metric says - it could even be
| _lower_ than usual if there 's a bottleneck somewhere else - it
| is a problem that needs to be addressed. You can then use the
| other metrics to confirm, or try to isolate the problem. But they
| should be supporting information, not your main diagnostics tool.
|
| > In a project I worked on, our development builds started
| writing about 80 MB of log messages per second to disk.
|
| Well, there you go. If you just look at disk I/O you'll see that
| it is high. But if you track metrics from your logging system,
| you'll be able to immediately see _why_
|
| Datadog (no affiliation here) has a good blog that set me on the
| right track:
| https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitoring-101-collecting-dat...
|
| By all means monitor those metrics on your work laptop - very few
| people are going to bother running prometheus in their dev
| machine and setting up alerts for third party apps. But for the
| apps you are responsible for? Figure out, from day zero, what
| metrics you should collect for your app and monitor those
| instead.
| perakojotgenije wrote:
| if you're using linux I highly recommend conky_seamod:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/oMPG7IO.png
|
| https://github.com/maxiwell/conky-seamod
| amlib wrote:
| And if you are a GNOME user, tophat is a very similar
| alternative to what the author suggests:
|
| https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5219/tophat/
| kazinator wrote:
| It must be a conspiracy involving Microsoft. :)
|
| For years, noisy hard drives with blinking lights served to
| highlight the difference between thrashy Microsoft operating
| systems and smoothly running, performant alternatives.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| Most of laptops still have fans these days. They just spin less
| because the machine is much more powerful. Maybe reading 100MB/s
| is not as concerning as 30 years ago? My M1 macbook still gives
| me fan noise occasionally, like when I forget to exit an infinite
| loop. But I appreciate that most of the background tasks would
| not need my attentions anymore.
|
| Back in the days I didn't enjoy the LED or the sound of disks.
| They disrupted my workflow and not always actionable. I mean, I
| don't really need to know that the machine is working hard on
| reading the optical discs I just inserted. I will take action if
| the reading slows down my foreground program.
| yarone wrote:
| Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to
| crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds
| of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a
| crash..." And then blue screen of death.
| fullstop wrote:
| Back when I had a PC which was somewhat capable of playing
| games I would play Left 4 Dead in cooperative mode. You play
| along with three other players, and navigate the levels
| attempting to move from one safe room to another, fighting a
| hoarde of infected. The game attempts to keep the players
| moving by adding "special" infected, which have different
| abilities and are good at forcing the team to leave the current
| area.
|
| One of the special infected was the Tank, which is quite strong
| and can throw chunks of pavement. I always knew when he was
| coming because my PC was kind of weak and the fans would go
| nuts about 30 seconds before he made an entrance. The other
| players were surprised that I had a sixth sense when it came to
| knowing when it was happening.
| amlib wrote:
| Too much HDD noise was also a really good indication that your
| computer ran out of memory and stuff is being moved into swap.
| I remember some occasions where I would alt-tab from a game in
| Windows 98 and my computer would freeze for half a minute
| (while doing concerning HDD noises) until I regained control of
| the desktop.
| chuckadams wrote:
| On the Commodore 64, you knew your floppy was bad when the
| drive would reset itself, slamming the read/write head against
| the stop repeatedly. "tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRAAAAAAP" ...
| eventually knocking the head out of alignment, requiring a
| hardware fix (not a difficult fix, but tedious). Copy
| protection was notorious for causing drive knocking, so people
| often used cracked versions of games they purchased just to
| prevent it (they tended to load much faster too).
| rwmj wrote:
| Don't worry, my laptop fans spin up to high whenever I run Google
| Meet.
| hiddendoom45 wrote:
| For working with remote machines that I need to ssh into I've
| found mobaXTerm[1] to be a very useful terminal emulator. It has
| an optional remote monitoring feature that shows the usual stats
| as a small bar under the active terminal window.
|
| It's a windows only application though.
|
| [1] https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
| heads wrote:
| When I used to use macOS on Intel laptops I would be hit, every
| so often, by gpg's smartcard pinentry getting stuck in a 100%
| loop. The only thing that ever notified me of it was the fan
| turning on!
| layer8 wrote:
| Desktop PCs (and mini-PCs) still have the blinking HDD LED.
|
| Since the first time I got a second HDD, I was always
| disappointed that there wasn't a dedicated LED per HDD. NAS cases
| actually have that.
| remlov wrote:
| https://github.com/exelban/stats is a solid open-source
| alternative to istat.
| mysql wrote:
| Totally agree with this article, there are no immediate
| consequences to bad CPU bound code. I am seeing the consequences
| of this at my current position as a Senior Engineer at a startup
| where a lot of things were written naively, pushed the burden to
| cloud costs to keep pushing out features.
|
| Something that really taught me to look for things like the "HDD
| Light" or Fan speed was starting my career in embedded systems.
| 16 bit MCUs really let you know if you are trying to much on
| them. They also let you know if you toggle the wrong pin by going
| up in flames.
|
| The disconnect between your fingers and what actually runs the
| code is becoming greater and greater for newer developers. It
| will be interesting to see how computing power keeps up with bad
| code (it had been doing a good job so far).
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| CNA I ask how did you switch away from embedded?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Programmers don't (can't?) dog food[1] their code because their
| development machines are Intel Xeon or AMD Threadripper
| monstrosities with abominable GPUs to match.
|
| Most apparent are the web programmers, most of them assume
| everyone has 10gbit fiber connections with 16 core CPUs and
| 128GB of RAM to feed to Chrome. And then they wonder why their
| shit runs like shit in the real world.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
| JohnFen wrote:
| > their development machines are Intel Xeon or AMD
| Threadripper monstrosities with abominable GPUs to match.
|
| Not all developers. In my entire career, I've never had a
| development system that was better than the average consumer
| machine. And, honestly, I wouldn't want one that was, for the
| exact reasons you state.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Are you certain about that? I'd wager that the average
| (median?) consumer machine these days is a a smartphone,
| and not an especially high-end one at that.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure. I'm not counting smartphones in this at
| all, though, because I don't develop apps for smartphones
| anymore (it's not a market that interests me). By
| "average machine", I meant a budget laptop or tower.
| twisteriffic wrote:
| > Most apparent are the web programmers, most of them assume
| everyone has 10gbit fiber connections with 16 core CPUs and
| 128GB of RAM to feed to Chrome
|
| Facebook marketplace. I don't know how you can make a grid of
| images max out a 5800x, but they've managed it. A markedly
| inferior product to every one of the classified ad
| competitors they've squashed out of existence.
| thfuran wrote:
| I would say rather that code badness has been keeping up with
| computing power increases.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law (May he rest in
| peace.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
|
| I wonder if this phenomenon can be generalized under one law,
| because clearly it pops up anywhere humans are concerned.
| barnabee wrote:
| I've found stats [1] to be a great open source alternative to the
| iStat Menus system monitor app mentioned in the article.
|
| [1] https://github.com/exelban/stats
| nosrepa wrote:
| I swear I saw on LGR a CF card adapter that made noise with a
| little motor to simulate the sounds of hdd access.
|
| Not an edit:
|
| Found it!
|
| https://youtu.be/IZKttBr2Y8g?si=ij3eFlmtrpIsYrkf
| petsfed wrote:
| Maybe its because I work on embedded firmware, where detailed
| logging is occasionally at the expense of device function, but I
| find the absence of blinking LEDs really unsettling.
|
| I've repeatedly removed and replaced the batteries on my
| thermostat's remote temperature sensor, because there's no visual
| feedback that its otherwise working, and my house was cold.
|
| The absence of "working" lights when I _know_ I 'm doing a
| processor-intensive operation on a computer is similarly
| unsettling. Its not directly actionable feedback, certainly, but
| it can be a proxy for a more directly actionable, but more
| onerous to implement or use, feedback mechanism.
| elzbardico wrote:
| There are plenty of ease to use libraries and tools to instrument
| and profile your code today.
|
| If people don't use them, if they don't care about the
| performance, it is on them, not in the lack of noisy spinning
| disks and machines behaving as if they were hair driers.
| gbolcer wrote:
| They have LED cpu cooler displays now that you can stick anything
| you want on it including disk/mem/heat/whatever. They are really
| amazing.
| joosters wrote:
| Ah, such rose-tinted glasses!
|
| My first PC - much like the one pictured in the story, had a fan
| that was spinning 100% of the time, because most PCs then were
| too primitive to have a temperature sensor that controlled fan
| speed. And you couldn't hear the hard drive because the fan was
| so noisy. So much for these performance indicators!
|
| The only thing audible above the loud PC was when the hard drive
| died, and spent all its time making nasty mechanical clicking
| sounds. But since the computer had locked up by that point, it
| wasn't much of a help!
| cesarb wrote:
| Since the theme is noisy feedback, I have to mention this old
| project: "Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring your network
| with sound" (https://web.archive.org/web/20220930162655/peep.sour
| ceforge....), discussed here some time ago
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017337).
| pengaru wrote:
| When personal computers became just another consumer electronics
| gadget, they ceased being tools optimized for their prior primary
| use cases.
|
| It's no surprise this has resulted in removal of things like
| status/activity lights. The same thing happened to automobiles
| when they went mainstream. Now you have to get an
| enthusiast/sports car just to get oil pressure and voltage
| gauges, and even then they're likely to be nerfed to non-
| linearity so they're always in the same place until so far
| outside of normal that it's too late to prevent any negative
| consequences.
|
| I'm looking at you, rental Turbo Passat coolant gauge that stayed
| perfectly still until overheating in Death Valley accompanied by
| an instantaneous jump from Normal to pinned in the red on the
| temperature gauge I was attentively monitoring. smh.
|
| Another example is the original MX-5's oil pressure gauge that
| was so active you could use it as a proxy for engine RPM, which
| is _normal_. The next generation "improved" this with one that
| stayed stationary in the upper range once the engine had any
| pressure at all, compressing all "normal" pressures to that
| needle position, effectively turning it into an oil pressure
| switch+light in analog needle form.
|
| I'm still waiting for a PC/Laptop manufacturer targeting
| specifically this market. Clicky keyboards, hardware connectivity
| switches, status/activity lights galore, i.e. a rebirth of the OG
| classic ThinkPads w/modern SoCs/displays/batteries. They'll be
| expensive, but so are Porsches, I can't be alone in wanting
| this...
| krunck wrote:
| 100% percent agree with the article.
|
| Its funny how we all differ in respect to what kind of feedback
| we find acceptable from our computers. I turn off all audio
| notifications. I MUST have a hard disk light. I need graphs
| running at all times. I like to hear fans spinning up when the
| CPU/GPU is hot. And I never want to have my computer talk to me.
| ethernet jacks MUST have link and activity lights.
|
| This is the way.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't need the graphs, but I'm with you on turning off audio
| notifications and the need for HDD/Ethernet/etc. lights. And I,
| too, never want my computer to talk to me, nor do I want too
| have to talk to it.
| Affric wrote:
| Right?
|
| My keyboard came with RGB. I don't care for it but I let it
| light up if any kind of lock is engaged and it glows a low red
| colour beneath the keys that I click.
|
| That's the only step I go beyond you. And the only reason I did
| it was because no lights at all for the keyboard meant cycling
| through every possible setting.
|
| My computer is a machine. Its beauty is in its functionality.
| Being able to look at it and know what it's doing is important.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I have no nostalgia for noisy PC fans and hard disks.
|
| One thing that was cool though, was way back in the C64 days. If
| the SID chip's volume wasn't set to zero, then background sounds
| would come out of the speaker that were directly related to what
| the computer was doing. It was neat because it kind of sounded
| like an ethereal pipe organ. But you could "hear" basic things
| like complex computations vs. a short loop. I think disk drive
| data transfers were recognizable, but it's been a while.
| diggan wrote:
| Modern GPUs can do this too, noticeable in the coil whine that
| sometimes happens. Always happening for me with Unreal Engine
| editor for some reason, and sometimes in games. Performing GPU-
| heavy simulations also makes it noticeable on my 3090ti.
| Somewhat nice that I can hear how many FPS the simulation is
| doing by the intensity of the coil whine.
| myself248 wrote:
| My 486 was in the basement where my FM radio could barely pick
| up my favorite station. It had an analog tuner, and I found
| that if I tuned just off to the edge of the station, I'd get
| distinctive patterns of interference, just enough to tell how
| busy the bus was, while still being able to hear the music.
|
| It was enough to turn off the monitor and kick back during a
| long modem download, and the repetitive ticking of what I
| presume was the UART ISR, could've been the PATA chain, would
| tell me it was still in progress. When the ticking stopped, the
| transfer was done and I'd turn the monitor back on and get back
| to work.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| The 3 best words an engineer cam ever utter: "hmm, that's
| interesting..."
|
| Not good for the project schedule, but great for better
| understanding the system you are working on.
| justinl33 wrote:
| > _The obvious example are Macs: they haven't had hard disk LEDs
| for a really long time, and since the M1, they are silent and
| cold too._
|
| And if the fans on your MacBook Pro do happen to spin up when you
| hit 'run' you know you've made something at least O(n^3)
| eviks wrote:
| Awesome app indeed, well designed, and beats the hardware led
| indicators since it lists apps that are misbehaving (and not
| annoying like hdd noise)
| szundi wrote:
| Linux system monitor chart gadgets on the top/bottom panel kind
| of gives this back
| cronix wrote:
| One of the biggest "steps" I experienced was when SSD'd first
| came around. Suddenly "slow db queries" ran at light speed
| instead of taking 5+ seconds. It was quite physically noticeable
| and now it's not. You have to run EXPLAIN on everything to be
| sure.
|
| Going back a bit further, I fondly remember my dad yelling "did
| you PARK the hard disk?" whenever he heard me power down the old
| TRS80 with "state of the art" 5 meg HD physically bigger than my
| first PC (which had a 40meg HD - dad was jealous). If you didn't
| manually issue a park command, the read/write head could flop
| around and cause damage if you bumped or moved the HD.
| lambdaba wrote:
| "Don't forget to park the hard drive!" I remember this is the
| first thing they taught us in computer ed class, this was in
| Windows 3.1... Fun times, although it was mainly Word and some
| kid computer edu-game type software.
| lolc wrote:
| Can't get with the recommendation to run perf monitors. These
| displays irritate me with their constant movement. When I want to
| know what's up, I run dstat, htop, and friends. Most of the time,
| my screens are calm.
|
| Performance requirements should be covered by tests. Relying on
| the dev to notice is a form of manual testing. Nice if
| regressions are discovered that way, but don't rely on it.
|
| On the flip side, I once had a mainboard where psu noise leaked
| onto the audio path. The little chirps were only audible when it
| was quiet and gave me nonintrusive feedback on the activity level
| of the hardware. I still miss that board.
| a1o wrote:
| Whoa, I had a motherboard that had the same behavior. It was a
| long time ago, I rocked a Core2Quad at the time, but the
| motherboard had this issue that the audio in the headphones
| jacket would pickup both when the CPU was stressed (I guess due
| to power consumption) and additionally some mouse movement
| would also do small little noises - this forced me to use the
| keyboard more often, learned a lot of shortcuts at that time.
|
| I remember that computer wasn't like this from the get go but
| started exhibiting this, after an year with it, I used it like
| this for at least three more years and then got a new one and
| the old one was converted to a media center.
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(page generated 2024-01-05 23:00 UTC)