Google Chrome performance: Linux vs Windows - linux

I've done website with some expensive CSS3 effect - a lot of text shadows and animation. When I run this site in Google Chrome 37 on Ubuntu 14.04 FPS counter shows about 5 FPS. The same site in the same Chrome version on Windows 7 run at ~16 FPS.
Why is so much difference in FPS between this two versions of Chrome?

The reason for the observed behavior is that Chrome has put a lot of work optimizing drivers for major operating systems and it in fact runs slower on Linux.
Maybe, using Wine 5 you would be able to run the chrome windows version, and do some benchmarks and let the world know of the difference.

Related

HoloLens 2 Emulator visual updates extremely slow

I installed the latest version of the HoloLens 2 Emulator (10.0.20348.1501) on my Windows 10 Pro machine. I have 32GB of RAM, 11th Gen Intel 8 Core CPU, Nvidia 3080 (mobile) graphics card.
Initially I thought that the HoloLens emulator was super slow (an input such as trying to move the pointer can take 10, 20, 30 seconds to show up and sometimes doesn't even show up).
But upon testing some more, I've realized that my inputs are going through immediately (as I can tell from the sound feedback), it's just the visual feedback which is not updating. This testing is just inside the OS (without trying to launch an app I developed).
Any ideas what could be going on? In the performance monitoring tool, everything looks fine.
In the end, the only way to fix it, was to disable graphics switching in the BIOS, and set to Discrete only - despite the fact that the Nvidia GPU Activity shows that the GPU turns on when I launch the emulator.
If the emulator takes 10 seconds to update the graphic, there should be configurations issues. Based on my test, though I cannot say it works fluently in my PC, the HoloLens 2 emulator runs at around 15 fps. There is delay but should be work fine for testing. (I am running it with Nvidia 1080 (mobile), with a much older CPU than yours.)
Please check the document on Using the HoloLens Emulator - Mixed Reality | Microsoft Docs and make sure you have configured your computer properly.
In BIOS
Intel VT -> enabled
Intel VT-d -> disabled
Hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP) (or any Intel data protection related feature, display name could be varied) -> disabled
In Windows
After BIOS configuration is done, completely shut down your PC, then boot. (Directly reboot may not apply changes).
Run dxdiag to check:
DirectX 11.0 or later (12.0 in my PC)
WDDM 2.5 graphics driver or later (3.0 in my PC)
Hyper-V Checking
Enable it if it is not. Reboot is required.
If it is already enabled. Disable it -> reboot the PC -> enable it again -> reboot
Others
For the laptop, make sure the power supply is plug-in and it is not in power-save mode. Check the GPU payload (around 36% in Nvidia 1080 mobile)
Then you may run the emulator again to see if this issue still exists.

Annoying external monitor scaling

Two days ago I updated my RubyMine and WebStorm installs to the latest version (v2017.2) and immediately had issues with scaling on my external monitors. My laptop has a 4k screen and I use twin full HD external monitors. Normally when I slide an app window from 4k --> Full HD the window and fonts shrink appropriately and the reverse happens going the other way.
I thought I did something wrong before I updated or applied some weird software/system setting so I looked at my preference settings and I played around with my monitor resolutions and scalings. Nothing made the apps appear the way it did before the update. I uninstalled the software and downgraded to the previous versions (v2017.1.x) and it worked again!!!
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Have you been able to figure out why it happens and what you did to fix it?
System info:
Toshiba Satellite S55t 4k
Windows 10 Creators Update
Asus VN248H-P
StarTech USB3 dock USB3SDOCKDD

How to force OpenGL 3 in Linux's Unreal Engine 4 Editor?

I'm experiencing graphical artifacts within Unreal Engine 4 Editor on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Intel HD Graphics 520 - Mesa 13.0.4). Glitches are visible in the preview window, as seen on the image pasted below:
Glitch example
I have the latest mesa drivers, installing Mesa 17.x.x is not an option, since they cause problems for the OS overall - problems with which I don't want to struggle (yet).
Running the engine with the -opengl3 flag seems to have no effect whatsoever. Example run:
Engine/Binaries/Linux/UE4Editor Absolute/Path/To.uproject -opengl3
Changing the Anti-Alias settings in Settings->Scalability does not make a difference as well.
Long story short, how can I tackle this problem? Is developing in UE4 on Linux without a dedicated graphics card possible?
In your Project Settings, you can change which rendering tech you want. It's in either General Settings or Rendering, I forget which; search for OpenGL.
As to developing on and for an in-built graphics card - Unreal will probably complain a lot, and performance will probably suffer. I think the gpu is used extensively for materials, but honestly this isn't something I know a great deal about. It would be an interesting test. You should profile your game (the profileGPU console while in-game should give a ton of information).

Bad JetBrains Intellij IDEA and Android Studios CPU usage on Ubuntu

As an Android developer I've been moving away from Eclipse to Intellij IDEA for production code in anticipation of Google's Android studios which shares a code base with IDEA.
My experience has been a good one up to this point. I've only been using IDEA at the office, where I have a 4x core Intel i7 machine running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Sun JDK/JRE), up to this point and I've never noticed what the performance of IDEA really is.
Now however after setting IDEA up on my personal computer at home the performance is abysmal. Memory usage is normal, but the constant CPU usage bounces between 80%-100% (over the whole application lifecycle). And that is when nothing else is running on the machine and no work is being done, by me or visually by the IDE.
This makes IDEA unusable when working on it, and I can forget about having anything else running along side it.
My home specs and software are:
Intel Core 2 duo 3GHz
8 GB RAM
Ubuntu 12.04 x64 LTS (3.8.0-35-generic) running of SSD SATA
Intellij IDEA 13.0-0ubuntu1 build: IC-133.193
Tried both OpenJDK and Sun
And the strange thing is that this happens as well with Android Studios.
All help in trying to debug this behaviour would be appreciated.
#Edit 1:
Noticed that the CPU load falls down to 20% when bringing up dialogs (Project structure, Settings, etc) and then goes right back up when dismissing them.
#Edit 2:
I tested simply getting the tarball straight from JetBrains, instead of using the one in Canonical's ppa. The performance was significantly better for at least an hour (20-30% CPU usage while idle). Seems that the native file watcher in C-PPA wasn't working properly and was indexing the whole filesystem.
However the performance became worse after the first hour or so, going back to 90-100% CPU.
The issue turned out to be the native-file watcher being out-of-date. IntelliJ was re indexing my whole drive it seems. Was fixed by uninstalling the version gotten from Canonical's ppa and installing directly from JetBrain's own webpage.
Are you using any plugins outside of the included ones which might cause issues.
I don't run Ubuntu anymore but can't recall any issues with high CPU-usage when i did. (I use Fedora with KDE a colleague uses Fedora with GNOME though. )
Does this always happen or only when you have a project open?
I'm thinking if this might have something to do with the background-compile that IDEA does.
Might be worth trying to turn this off.
Found under Project Settings -> Compiler -> Make Project Automatically
worst case it is a Unity-integration issue or something. Haven't used unity so can't say.
Usualy I manage to fix it by deleting IDE's index files rm -rf ~/.RubyMine60/system,
don't forget to change .RubyMine60 to IDEA's config folder
If you're willing to do some sleuthing, you could run the Oracle JVM and use the VisualVM profiler to see where the IDE is spending all its time, presuming it's a Java-based process that's actually eating your CPU cycles.

What are the pros and cons of using a Mac for web development? [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I have been using Fedora Linux for quite some time now for web development (and for other dev stuff as well). But just recently, someone told me that since I'm doing web development, I might as well use a Mac. I feel like Macs are overrated. Why should I (or should I not) use a Mac?
Ok, here is my 2 cents.
I am a PC guy, have been for years.
I purchased a MAC about 3 years ago, and installed the Macromedia Tools (Dreamwaver, etc).
Despite my best attempts, I just could not be productive -- I was just so used to the way things worked in Windows, the MAC OS (while very nice) felt counter-productive to me.
So, I am back to the PC (have been for years).
My point is, whatever OS you are USED to is the one you will be the most productive on, with the only exception being if there is a particular APP that is only available on another OS.
So, I would stick with what you know (apparently, LINUX), or be prepared to lose some productivity for a while.
I have been doing web development on Linux for years. Despite owning a Mac, I have never once needed to use it for web development.
VIM, Apache, MySQL, Inkscape, Gimp, GEdit, Firefox+addons
That is all I need.
I will test in IE and Safari and others, but that is testing, not development.
unless you can think of a reason, why should you?
I can think of one good reason, there's an OSX software called CSSEdit which could be the best CSS editor I ever used. It supports something similar to #region found in VS and also have a good hierarchy view on rules and classes.
I really enjoy using my MacBook Pro for all kinds of development, not just web development, but not for any of the reasons anyone has mentioned. Sure it has nice Unix underpinnings, and is very pretty to look at. The main reason I use the Mac and OS X for development is how well and consistently it works. The keyboard shortcuts are consistent across all applications, and the keyboard is laid out in a way that makes it very natural to use the operating system's commands. For me, it's much easier and faster to use the Mac Keyboard in conjunction with OS X for development, even on a laptop, than it is to use a mouse/keyboard on a desktop. I also don't have to worry about drivers or programs working, like I do with Linux (e.g. Adobe Flex).
I've been using Mac for web development for the past year and have recently moved over to Ubuntu Linux and am having a much better time.
Here's why:
Integrated package management: while macs have macports, this isn't integrated across the whole OS. With ubuntu I can type in a couple of commands (or use a GUI if I were so inclined) and have LAMP up and running in about 3 minutes flat. This is without the user of any shrink-wrapped 'LAMP Installations' like XAMMP or MAMP or EasyPHP, just the raw software itself. This becomes a lot more important when you start using tools like pear, phpunit, rubygems etc which are much less hassle to configure and get working on ubuntu than they were on the Mac.
Nice Terminal: Relevant only to Unix based developers I guess, but it has a nice multi-tabbed terminal (iterm on mac has this, but it became face-achingly slow for some reason) that expands to a complete fullscreen.
UPDATE: I'm still on Tiger. Leopard, admittedly has a pretty good terminal.
Easy Virtualization: Again, Mac may have options for this but I probably gave up trying to install them. I'm currently using wine and virtualbox for virtualizing windows and testing IE for web dev projects.
Nice Open Source Alternatives To Graphics Software: I don't like stealing software, and I can't afford photoshop etc. GIMP and Inkscape are good enough for me. Again these are available on the Mac, but the X windowing system that GIMP uses doesn't work so well on OSX. Flawless in ubuntu however.
Overall I'm just way more productive on a linux machine. This could be because I like things at the terminal rather than with GUI's, but the big win for me is definitely the ease of installing new programmer-relevant software with apt-get.
I personally don't think there are any cons (unlike when I have to develop on windows box GRRRRRR!). The pros are as follows
Test in any browser on on any platform
Apache built in (But I recommend MAMP)
Great native developer tools (Coda BBEdit et al)
A major con is the lack of Internet explorer. That being said, I have Internet Explorer 6 installed Via Wine, so I can use it like any other Mac program (in X11).
It also probably takes more work to get ASP setup on a mac, like installing mono, but even that is easy enough.
There is a lot of great web software that I LOVE on the mac, such as Coda, Transmit, CSSEdit and TextMate.
I'm a PHP programmer, and having developed on a Mac for 2 years, I've come to the conclusion I would rather be using anything else.
Since the original question was in regards to using a Mac instead of Linux for web development, that's how I've rephrased my pros & cons.
Pros of Mac over Linux:
Fully supported by commercial grade products (Adobe, for example).
Cons of Mac over Linux:
Larger than normal buy-in cost for a complete system.
Closed system - no hardware upgrades except maybe HDD & RAM.
Edit: In regards to the comments I've received, I've re-evaluated my response to be more in line with the original question.
It really doesn't matter when coming to the Web. Adobe's products are considered some of the best in the industry - such as Flash and Photoshop. You can easily get these on Windows too.
I think that web development is one of the things Linux is very good at, because you can easily setup all the standard server side components. On a mac you can do that too but MacPorts and Fink just don't are the same quality and so updated as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
One point for the Mac may be the availability of good commercial development products.
For web development it really doesn't matter what kind of operating system you are using. Even though I am using a Mac, web developers using Windows may have the advantage of running Internet Explorer native while the rest has to use virtual machines for that. But again, it doesn't really matter then.
The only pro-point I can think of is that 90% of the design folks are using Macs, so you would be able to keep up with the coolness-factor many of them are trying to pull-off.
Well if I remember correctly, you can't really do flash developmenton Linux. Plus, as much as people praise the merits of GIMP, I don't think it's quite on par with Photoshop / Illustrator in term of ease of use (heck there is a part in the FAQ that explain you how to draw a circle).
I tend to prefer Windows for whatever developpement though as I really like Visual Studio.
It's my impression that a lot of Ruby on Rails and other relatively new and cool languages have good support on the Mac. I often read about Silicon Valley hipsters (there's that word again) being Mac-centric.
Also, obviously, if you ever intend to get into iPhone development, you'd be all set.
CSSEdit + Adobe Dreamweaver + TextMate + Transmit FTP + Firefox with FireBug and FirePHP and you good to go on MAC ;)
I moved to MAC 2 years ago, no regrets.
It's certainly handy to have a Mac around, if nothing else to check for Safari compatibility, but most of the better tools I've encountered are pretty much platform independent (outside of the .Net world anyway, and even they have Mono).
All of the following are available on all the major platforms
Firefox/firebug for browser debugging (on Mac, Windows and Linux)
Eclipse or Netbeans for IDE (ditto)
Tomcat
Xampp is available on all major platforms in slightly different flavours and gives you most of the tools you'd need for a whole class of development.
The only reason I can see to tie yourself to a particular platform If you have a particular niche you need to target and the application only runs on that one platform. But as this is web development you're talking about you may well find yourself excluding most of the world.
After juggling with various environments. I finally have the following configuration.
Use Windows for Visual Studio Team System development.
Use WinSCP, Notepad++ on Windows to connect to a Linux machine via sFTP and develop PHP
Use terminal on MAC for mysql development. Sometimes I use putty on Windows as well.
Use MAC for Flash CS4 and Flex development.
Overall, in my context, I found Windows to be much stronger platform than MAC for web development.
Really, the issue is that Apple sells hardware and a user experience. With the Mac you would be able to bring the computer to any local apple store for rapid repair and tech support. They wrap the open-source BSD like Darwin OS with a convenient GUI that they control to present a unified experience. So it's just as powerful as you are used to an OS being but has amazing convenience for both software and hardware.
As others mentioned you can run IE with wine, so there's nothing you can't do on it for web development, plus there are great mac only webdev apps (read the other posts).
e.g. I develop on my mac using the full power of *nix (the differences are negligible, like if you need to use RC for anything and don't want to mess with OSX's launched). If anything goes wrong with the hardware I go to the local mall, they fix it asap, and I'm back to programming.
Do you really want to buy your Dell and mess with installing whatever OS then when it breaks talking with some guy in India before they'll let you ship it to Kazmandu for fixes?
Why not give it a try?
While developing any commercial web based application it is important to give "Look n Feel" and "Usability" its due importance. DUring development phase the application looks and works excellent on MAC but when run on Windows, it starts to show problems.
Considering the large number of target audience who use Windows or Linux, I feel that development of Web Applications is better done on Windows or Linux.
Pros: TextMate & CSSedit
Cons:
here is what I see that are good on Mac's for web dev
CSSEdit (only for Mac) - this package makes CSS editing so much easier. The X-ray function is a must have. Firebug has somewhat similar capability and free, but it's just not as well implemented as CSSEdit, and I searched for Windows equivalent and found none.
Probably better support with Adobe software than Linux :p
Coda or Espresso (only for Mac) are two other web developing suit I personally think are much better then Dreamweaver.
System is fairly hassle free. Less time dealing with system. More time for coding, or whatever it is that you want to do.
Exposé windows management is a great time saver too
Time machine back up is another gem. Easy to setup, and saved my butt quite a few times.
Colors system on Macs are better than Windows as far as I know
Parallels Desktop or VMWare are fast enough to debug IE, so no reboot or a separate computer necessary. (Sorry, not sure what the Fedora situation is though)
OS interface is much better than windows (again, no Fedora experience here). It takes about 2 weeks to get used to (from several friends experience). After that, there is usually no turning back.
There are cons of course, but right now I can only think of one:
Notebook's screen sucks… all TN panels. They are maybe good enough for average users, but for any color critical work, it's just no up to the snuff, so if you get a notebook, you wanna get a decent external monitor.
The Mac doesn't really have an edge over Linux for Web Development. If your comfortable and productive on Linux don't bother switching.
However, If the thought of having Unix with a pretty face and well thought out GUI appeals to you then the Mac is an excellent choice. I have one for development at work and use Linux at home for personal projects. For development work there isn't much difference. The difference is in all the non-development stuff.
For instance I absolutely love Quicksilver on the Mac. It's a wonderful interface to most of what I do. I almost never use it when doing code though. It comes in handy when I launch music or open a web page or play a video or any one of a hundred other things I do on that machine. The polish is nice but when it comes time to get serious I just pull up a shell and get just as productive as I am on Linux.
I cannot speak for myself, as I don't own a Mac (or have consistently worked on one), but I work in an environment full of Macs. And I can tell you, most of them are mac users that happen to be web developers as well. They are productive because they take advantage of whatever the features a Mac offers them, and can control their environment. This applies to all operating systems, but the switch involves a learning curve that you must be willing to accept.
You should also consider compatibility, when working on a team. We usually don't have any problems setting up the application environment or working consistently with the code between different OS. But if you need to do image edition stuff, work with very Mac specific tools or need specific software (IE comes to mind), you may be tied to the OS.
The short answer: it depends on how much effort do you require for adapting. The user experience in Mac seems to be the killer feature over deciding. Other than that, they are pretty much the same in term of productiveness, except maybe for the software some people has pointed out already.

Resources