Comment by jart
10 months ago
It's not a technical tradeoff, it's a refusal to compromise. Lack of frame pointers prevents many groups from using software built by distros altogether. If a distro decides that they'd rather make things go 1% faster for grandma, at the cost of alienating thousands of engineers at places like Netflix and Google who simply want to volunteer millions of dollars of their employers resources helping distros to find 10x performance improvements, then the distros are doing a great disservice to both grandma and themselves.
I mean if you need to do performance analysis on a software just recompile it. Why it's such a big deal?
In the end a 2% of performance of every application it's a big deal. On a single computer may not be that significant, think about all the computers, servers, clusters, that run a Linux distro. And yes, I would ask a Google engineer that if scaled on the I don't know how many servers and computers that Google has a 2% increase in CPU usage is not a big deal: we are probably talking about hundreds of kW more of energy consumption!
We talk a lot of energy efficiency these days, to me wasting a 2% only to make the performance analysis of some software easier (that is that you can analyze directly the package shipped by the distro and you don't have to recompile it) it's something stupid.
The average European home consumes 400 watts at any given moment. Modern digital smart meters can consume 4 watts on average, which is 1% of a household's power consumption. On the grand scheme of society, these 1% losses in each home add up. If we consider all the grid monitoring equipment that's typically employed by electrical companies outside the home, the problem becomes much greater. In order to maximize energy efficiency and improve our environmental footprint, we must remove these metering and monitoring devices, which don't actually contribute to the delivery and consumption of power.
> I mean if you need to do performance analysis on a software just recompile it. Why it's such a big deal?
Not having them enabled on all dependencies makes them significantly less useful if your application interacts with the system in a meaningful way. "Just recompile" (glibc + xorg + qt + whatever else you use) is a very hefty thing.
Having them enabled by default also enables devs to ask their users for traces. I can reasonably tell someone to install sysprof or something, click a few buttons and send me a trace. I cannot reasonably tell them to compile the project (+ dependencies). And tbh, even devs cba if they have to jump through too many hoops.
> We talk a lot of energy efficiency these days, to me wasting a 2% only to make the performance analysis of some software easier (that is that you can analyze directly the package shipped by the distro and you don't have to recompile it) it's something stupid.
We're trading all kinds of efficiencies for all kinds of niche benefits all the time. This enables analysis of what is shipped in real use across the whole stack with the alternative being much less useful or a lot more (human) work. To me it's worth 2% and I'm shocked (well... not really) it's not for more people.
Presenting people with false dichotomies is no way to build something worthwhile