> I mean, they're not wrong. I have Discord sitting open at the login screen and it's burning 10% of a core. Run a few Electron apps and your core2duo suddenly becomes a core1uno.
That is what I said about “people look at the measurement at the desktop and freak out about single-digit utilization without even realizing their processor is sitting in the lowest frequency state”.
Is your processor even boosting all its cores when that 10% measurement is taken? In my experience usually it is not. Maybe different for Zen2/Zen3 but cpu measurement gets very complicated in general for those architectures since it can move between boost states so fast - it can boost so agilely that you can end up with garbage numbers because it’s moving between boost states faster than the task manager can enumerate the threads. It can move between boost states between the time you take the frequency measurement and the time you start enumerating the cpu load. This was a whole thing a couple years ago when people started looking at Zen2 and it turns out most third-party tools can’t handle this and only Ryzen Master gives you an accurate picture of what it’s doing.
In general it is such a small amount of cpu that it’s not worth caring about.
Also, typically while you game you’d have the overlay up and not the actual UI and that’s even faster - showing the login screen is likely slower than actually in game.
Load up a game and the cpu will be loaded up harder and will stay boosted and then take your measurement of discord.
People who are casually making observations about how intensive discord are never do that, it’s just “I see it using 6% at the desktop” [with the processor in the idle state rendering a full ui instead of just the overlay].
I ran a quick `while true {}` in the background. It used 7B cycles per second (twice the clock speed for some reason?), while Discord used about 700M. Discord does drop lower if I minimize the window. But still, thousands of context switches per second, while completely logged out. I have no idea what it could be doing.
You're right that I'm probably not benchmarking rigorously enough. But people don't care about any of this stuff. They care about "my FPS gets lower when Discord is open, pls fix". And they don't want to micromanage CPU usage either. Make sure you minimize Discord after starting the call, make sure you close that gmail tab during the game then open it back up when you're done so you don't miss notifications? No thanks. I'd rather just pay for a few more cores.
I guess what triggered me is you saying you cringe at the end users. They don't deserve that. They just want the stuff they buy to work reliably. And if they need a bunch of extra headroom for that to happen, well, that's just the sorry state of the industry. If you must cringe at someone, direct your cringe at developers.
That is what I said about “people look at the measurement at the desktop and freak out about single-digit utilization without even realizing their processor is sitting in the lowest frequency state”.
Is your processor even boosting all its cores when that 10% measurement is taken? In my experience usually it is not. Maybe different for Zen2/Zen3 but cpu measurement gets very complicated in general for those architectures since it can move between boost states so fast - it can boost so agilely that you can end up with garbage numbers because it’s moving between boost states faster than the task manager can enumerate the threads. It can move between boost states between the time you take the frequency measurement and the time you start enumerating the cpu load. This was a whole thing a couple years ago when people started looking at Zen2 and it turns out most third-party tools can’t handle this and only Ryzen Master gives you an accurate picture of what it’s doing.
In general it is such a small amount of cpu that it’s not worth caring about.
Also, typically while you game you’d have the overlay up and not the actual UI and that’s even faster - showing the login screen is likely slower than actually in game.
Load up a game and the cpu will be loaded up harder and will stay boosted and then take your measurement of discord.
People who are casually making observations about how intensive discord are never do that, it’s just “I see it using 6% at the desktop” [with the processor in the idle state rendering a full ui instead of just the overlay].