Why do computers (and perhaps other electronics?) slow down?

[king.oslo]

Hello there,

I have owned so many computers in my life. As time pass, they seem to preform tasks slower than when they are new.

Even if I reformat the HDD and restore the computer to the original software, the computers get slower than when they are new.

I noticed this with my iPhone 3G and 4G. My father's 4G hasn't slowed down nearly as much,

Why are the devices getting slower? Could the silicon be getting worn out? And does this happen to all processors?

What are your views?

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,
Marius

[KTP]

I think the computer speed stays exactly the same but software requires faster and faster processors.

[JuiceKing]

I don't think the hardware itself is slowing down.

Rather, the software--in the form of the operating system and all kinds of add-ons--is getting more complicated and slower in order to serve more uses as it evolves.

Software engineers generally use up all the resources made available to them in order to get products out quickly and with as many features as they can. These resources tend to grow with each new generation of hardware. The new versions of software are designed to work with the new hardware, so they are more than the old hardware was originally designed to handle.

A good example of this is the iPad. I have the first generation model, and when I got it, it ran very fast. I had no complaints about performance at all. But that was when the iOS operating system had a very primitive, if efficient, capability for managing multiple apps simultaneously. As iOS evolved, the processing requirements grew. New iPads running the latest iOS are probably fast enough that it's not a bother, but my old iPad does seem to struggle more than it should to handle the sophisticated multitasking that it can do.

There's also a psychological aspect to all of this. What seemed fast when you got it isn't fast compared with the new stuff. But I think that you are not talking about that...you are observing the very real fact that the system as a whole does get slower. If and when hardware stops improving, you'll see this phenomenon go away. In the meanwhile, when it becomes unbearable, it's time to buy a new computer!

[tom66]

As computers double speed, software compensates by halving speed.

I notice completing a task in MS Office 2007 on a relatively new computer takes me twice as long as MS Office 2003 on a five year old computer. :/

[Sionyn]

bloat high level languages bad compliers
plus the notion that hardware will catch up

[david77]

I don't think the hardware gets any slower as it ages, at least I have never heard of something like that.

It's probably a psycological phenomenon. You use computers everywhere and everyday, it's just a matter of time until you spend some time in front of a much newer much more powerfull machine than the one you've got sitting on your desk at home. Many work places replace their machines quite frequently so maybe you spend 8 hours a day working with something much better than your PC at home. So you just simply get used to it and the older machine at home starts to seem to lose performance.
Add to that the kind of bloatware we have to put up with today and the crawling experience is perfect.

The PC I use the most at home is an elderly IBM Thinkpad 770Z. It's about 13-14 years old and really quite slow. But it works perfectly and I can do most of the stuff I want to do. An added benefit is that every other PC works really really fast in my eyes .

[FenderBender]

I think it's more software related than hardware though by no means is hardware not susceptible to aging.

The way the operating systems are written and the way other programs interact with them has a lot to do with it. For instance, even if you uninstall a program from your OS, there's still some sort of "leftovers" in the registry or in the filesystem. Even though that program isn't there, remnants of it still remain. There's so much that we don't see in operating systems and programs that goes on behind the scenes. Junk winds up in folders we don't know exist and thus we get that "slow-down".

Also as time progresses, the requirements of software grow. Software is kind of a "gas". It expands to whatever container it is in. As the hardware (container), get's better so does the requirements of the software (gas)..Weird analogy, but just popped in my head.

I think hardware can "slow-down" but not in the traditional sense. Computer hardware more or less works or doesn't work. Processors have lots of redundancy just incase one little transistor dies, the whole processor doesn't go to waste...or atleast that's what I've read. But it's not like the chip it's self is getting slow. Probably the only thing that can be hardware and will slow down your computer is your hard drive. This can happen in multiple ways. On a more software-oriented side, when bits are saved to the disc, they can get spread out all over the hard drive platter. So when the read head seeks this information, sometimes it takes a while for it to physically get to all of the magnetic bits and read them. Additionally, you've probably heard of a "bad sector" in your hard drive. That is one of the few instances where hardware does get slow over time. A bad sector means an actual part of the hardware is now unusable for whatever reason. So yes, that could definitely slow you down. But with flash based storage becoming the norm..slowly..that won't be as significant of a problem.

On that subject, yes silicon does wear down. NAND storage does actually have limitations. It's state can't be changed more than oh a few billion times before it wears down. Yes it can happen, but usually the effects aren't even significant enough for us to notice.

[king.oslo]

Our Asus eee laptop, has a feature where the disk is reformatted and the software which were shipped when it was new, is installed. It looks bloody slow. Opening IE takes about 20 secs.

I struggle to see that this is psychological, but I assume you are right.

Also, I have installed no apps or updated the OS of my iPhone, but nowadays it is slow as hell, compared to my fathers, which is still quick (they were bought at the same time).

What do you think?M

[kaptain_zero]

I just upgraded my computer to using an SSD for a boot drive about a month ago.... It was faster, but not really THAT much faster... then the drive failed and I purchased a local Top of the line version SDD tie me over... It seems slightly faster yet, but not it didn't seem that much faster. The maker of the first drive asked me to run some diagnostics on the drive for a few hours before returning it. There were no errors reported and so I placed it back in my system.

 I re-installed Linux and used it as before. On paper there is a large difference between the two drives, but in use on my particular computer, they seem pretty close. Then the suspect drive failed again, this time no question, just RMA it.  Installed the newer local purchased drive again, and as I said, it seemed a little quicker, but nothing earth shattering... until I mirrored the drive back to a mechanical drive and booted it to check that the image was good.... Oh my..... It seemed slow as molasses booting up... painfully slow even. Putting the new drive back in brought my computer back to it's new normal. Once you experience something faster, there's no going back.

Christian

[westfw]

flash memory can get slower over time as "wear leveling" algorithms move written data around, and I think I've heard that some SSDs have had actual bugs that can cause significant slow-downs.

Hardware doesn't get slower.  Software and firmware can have issues from changed data to bugs to intentional obsolescence code.  In the absence of a more technical analysis than "seems slow as hell", it's hard to say.  (Hmm.  Are there benchmark apps for iPhones, or is that the sort of app that is "discouraged"?)

[kaptain_zero]

My point was that every hardware *upgrade* I've ever done only seems *slightly* faster. Every time I'm forced to down grade one step... it seems horribly slow in comparison.

I've got an old computer upstairs that functions just fine... but I have to admit I find it intolerably slow. Good thing I'm a cheapskate, or it would have been upgraded about 8 years ago.

Christian

PS: These new SSD drives are quite amazing....  I'm not sure I trust them, but they do work quickly and silently, but as pointed out, they are only as good as the firmware embedded in them, and that bit is in constant flux. I happen to like companies that update their firmware fairly frequently.... Others seem to say if you want our latest, buy a new drive from us.

[olsenn]

The clock sources for your CPU, GPU, RAM, and other peripherals all stay the exact same frequency, (within a few ppm or the drift of the crystal oscillator multiplied by the PLL multiplication factor).

However, what is likely causing the noticable performance decrease is your harddrive. Not only do mechanical hardrives have to read at slower speeds as they age, the data you have stored on them, including your OS and all applications, gets fragmented and bloated with cache files and temporary storage files that you didn't even know were there. I bet you if you do a complete format of your hardrive and reinstall the same operating system and all the same applications, you will notice a 5X performance increase!

[nanofrog]

Code bloat. Add in all the patches and newer application revisions, it gets bloated to the point it strains the hardware you're running on as time passes.

For example, I've an old Pentium IV that would run the original Windows installation just fine. But if I just update the OS, all the patches and Service Packs end up bogging the system down considerably, even without a single application installed that wasn't part of the OS to begin with.

[vk6zgo]

The funny thing is,that back in the valve (tube) days,if you turned on a piece of Electronic equipment,you had to wait for the filaments to warm up.
When solid state arrived,we had "instant on".
Enormous efforts were expended to minimise CRT warm up time for those devices that used them.

It seems that only one generation was lacking patience,as now,with everything digital,we have to wait for them to boot up,& then waste more time with a "splash screen before we can use them,so we are back to the old days!

[olsenn]

The funny thing is,that back in the valve (tube) days,if you turned on a piece of Electronic equipment,you had to wait for the filaments to warm up.
When solid state arrived,we had "instant on".
Enormous efforts were expended to minimise CRT warm up time for those devices that used them.

It seems that only one generation was lacking patience,as now,with everything digital,we have to wait for them to boot up,& then waste more time with a "splash screen before we can use them,so we are back to the old days!

Software developers don't use performance increases of technology to make their programs faster; they use performance increases of technology to keep their programs at the same speed with less optimized code. Most programs (especially the good ones) are commercial; they only care that their code works... they don't care if their code works well.

If button 'A' is clicked, objective 'X' occurs:    PASS

If button 'A' is clicked, objective 'X' occurs
If another employee can make objective 'X' occur more quickly after pressing button 'A' then the first employee to program this requirement doesn't get paid     :    FUCK!

[T4P]

CPU Caches slowly and eventually will wear down as with DDR(X) RAM
Now, if your PC doesn't support UEFI and garbage collection you are in for some quick degradation if you use a SSD
Well,well always defragment your harddisk time to time, it helps keeps things moving quickly,
and the notion new software gets slower is always true...
But yeah, as a harddisk gets more and more packed, it requires longer seek times to find the data that was previously written and what you are looking for

[nitro2k01]

CPU Caches slowly and eventually will wear down as with DDR(X) RAM

Huh? No. RAM (or cache) failure would lead to a catastrophic failure, i.e. crashes, not a general slowdown.

Edit: I may have missed some sarcasm in that post.

[T4P]

CPU Caches slowly and eventually will wear down as with DDR(X) RAM

Huh? No. RAM (or cache) failure would lead to a catastrophic failure, i.e. crashes, not a general slowdown.

Edit: I may have missed some sarcasm in that post.

HP threw in a RAM and HDD checker in my previously alive TX2000 for a reason ... it's too hot

[NiHaoMike]

CPU Caches slowly and eventually will wear down as with DDR(X) RAM
Now, if your PC doesn't support UEFI and garbage collection you are in for some quick degradation if you use a SSD
Well,well always defragment your harddisk time to time, it helps keeps things moving quickly,
and the notion new software gets slower is always true...
But yeah, as a harddisk gets more and more packed, it requires longer seek times to find the data that was previously written and what you are looking for

The wear on RAM is negligible over the useful life of the device, even on embedded systems. Flash does, however, wear out.

I just upgraded my computer to using an SSD for a boot drive about a month ago.... It was faster, but not really THAT much faster... then the drive failed and I purchased a local Top of the line version SDD tie me over... It seems slightly faster yet, but not it didn't seem that much faster. The maker of the first drive asked me to run some diagnostics on the drive for a few hours before returning it. There were no errors reported and so I placed it back in my system.

I upgraded my old Core 2 Duo laptop with a 64GB Patriot SSD. I only created one partition, which of course would be the root (/). (Using a SSD just for /boot would be silly...) I used tmpfs for all temporary directories in order to avoid excessive wear on the SSD.

Boot performance was very amazing (for such an old PC) at just 20 seconds including BIOS. The disparity is particularly significant with slower laptop HDDs. My friend Ashley recently bought a Dell mobile workstation with an Ivy Bridge i7 but a standard HDD because Dell wildly overcharged for a SSD. She was surprised to see my old laptop boot faster than hers.

Desktop HDDs, however, are pretty fast and the difference is much smaller. A trick to keep HDDs fast is to use the first 120GB or so for the root (/), make the swap next, and use the remainder for a new directory (/bulk) that is only used for storing data that is infrequently accessed. This way, as you update software, all the program data and frequently used data stay in the first 120GB of the disk, reducing seek times and making the most of the fastest part of the disk.

[rsjsouza]

Agree 100% with the previous comments about the software being the culprit for progressive aging of perfectly functional hardware.

In my work I need multiple Linux-based PCs that were once loaded with Windows 2000 and XP - the oldest is a 1996 P-III 500MHz with 512MB RAM and the newest is a 2004 Athlon 64 2.2GHz with 1GB RAM. These machines have been running for several years but I did not notice any severe performance impact - on the contrary, several users still get amazed how fast these machines still operate. Obviously they are not used for any math-intensive or state-of-the-art 3D graphics...

[kaptain_zero]

A trick to keep HDDs fast is to use the first 120GB or so for the root (/), make the swap next, and use the remainder for a new directory (/bulk) that is only used for storing data that is infrequently accessed. This way, as you update software, all the program data and frequently used data stay in the first 120GB of the disk, reducing seek times and making the most of the fastest part of the disk.

Wow.... I can't imagine ever needing 120GB for my root partition (Then again, I don't develop software on this box, so I don't need all the libraries)... I rarely go much over 5GB in that partition, so I make it about 12GB to give it some elbow room.  I use a 128GB SSD, with 12GB for root, 4GB for swap (never seems to get used) and the remainder for my /home partition. I have a 500GB WD drive that I use for storing files. As I only dump and extract full files from that drive, it remains pretty much unfragmented. The EXT4 filesystem under linux is pretty good about reading fragmented drives anyway. I also have a complete XP install in Virtualbox to do some work I just can't seem to find the time to make work in Linux, and I have a clone of it, in case I bork the main virtual machine. Both VB images exist in my /home partition and I still have 60GB free.

Thanks to some issues, I've had to carefully pare down the stuff I store on this computer to something more reasonable and I now have 3 duplicate sets of drives that I mirror as backups, two 128GB SSD's and 2 500GB WD Black drives + a 160GB Seagate and a WD Blue 500GB. Any one of the 3 pairs are identical and can be swapped in should a failure occur with one of the other pairs. I use Clonezilla to do the cloning, and it has been rock solid for me.   I do have 3 x 1TB drives that have been pulled out of service as once I cleaned things up, they were not needed for their capacity at the moment.  Mind you, Dropbox has come in handy at times..... always nice to have some online storage.... just in case.

That 160GB Seagate drive is not fragmented, but it IS horribly slow vs either of my OCZ SSD drives for boot up.

Regards

Christian aka

Kaptain "Better safe than sorry, and don't ask me how I know that!" Zero

[Technoguy3]

Our Asus eee laptop, has a feature where the disk is reformatted and the software which were shipped when it was new, is installed. It looks bloody slow. Opening IE takes about 20 secs.

I struggle to see that this is psychological, but I assume you are right.

Also, I have installed no apps or updated the OS of my iPhone, but nowadays it is slow as hell, compared to my fathers, which is still quick (they were bought at the same time).

What do you think?M

On that, I assume you have updated your iPhone? Your father probably hasn't. The new OS's get more and more bloated with each update and thus get slower. I tend to not update my phone if I don't care about the updates because it usually makes it slower. Also, your phone may be taking on a lot of random background tasks. (The OS manages memory in such a way that processes are terminated when space needs to be freed)

[DrGeoff]

Software. Particularly Anything to do with Java.

[NiHaoMike]

Wow.... I can't imagine ever needing 120GB for my root partition (Then again, I don't develop software on this box, so I don't need all the libraries)... I rarely go much over 5GB in that partition, so I make it about 12GB to give it some elbow room.  I use a 128GB SSD, with 12GB for root, 4GB for swap (never seems to get used) and the remainder for my /home partition. I have a 500GB WD drive that I use for storing files. As I only dump and extract full files from that drive, it remains pretty much unfragmented. The EXT4 filesystem under linux is pretty good about reading fragmented drives anyway. I also have a complete XP install in Virtualbox to do some work I just can't seem to find the time to make work in Linux, and I have a clone of it, in case I bork the main virtual machine. Both VB images exist in my /home partition and I still have 60GB free.

Thanks to some issues, I've had to carefully pare down the stuff I store on this computer to something more reasonable and I now have 3 duplicate sets of drives that I mirror as backups, two 128GB SSD's and 2 500GB WD Black drives + a 160GB Seagate and a WD Blue 500GB. Any one of the 3 pairs are identical and can be swapped in should a failure occur with one of the other pairs. I use Clonezilla to do the cloning, and it has been rock solid for me.   I do have 3 x 1TB drives that have been pulled out of service as once I cleaned things up, they were not needed for their capacity at the moment.  Mind you, Dropbox has come in handy at times..... always nice to have some online storage.... just in case.

That 160GB Seagate drive is not fragmented, but it IS horribly slow vs either of my OCZ SSD drives for boot up.

Swap on a SSD is one of the worst ideas. It's a sure way to break it early. (For an experiment, I once tried using an old 64MB Flash drive as swap. It lasted a few months, but one day, the OpenWRT router it was attached to locked up and after rebooting, the drive didn't work at all.)

FWIW, my root is at about 28GB. But I do use it for development and there's quite a few files that haven't been moved to /bulk yet. I don't have a separate /home partition since properly sizing many partitions can be tricky. I suppose I could get away with a 60GB root, but the performance difference is tiny on 1TB and larger drives and it's nice to not have to move stuff to /bulk as often. (If you have both a standard HDD and a SSD, you could use the SSD as the root and the HDD as /bulk and swap.)

Also, do not refer to the root (/) drive as the boot (/boot) drive. The /boot partition was a workaround for BIOSes that could not address more than 1024MB or 8.4GB or 137GB or whatever of the disk. Modern BIOSes are not affected by that and do not need such a workaround.

[slateraptor]

As computers double speed, software compensates by halving speed.

Reality check:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/10/42368-a-view-of-the-parallel-computing-landscape/fulltext