I tried to figure out if this was real, and the closest I found was this article where setting a solid color background in windows 7 would cause up to a 30sec delay during login. The solution was apparently to make a small image in the color you wanted, and tile that image so that it would cover the whole desktop.
Here’s a hackernews discussion on it, includes some other fun stories like how windows 95 progress bars would complete faster if you were wiggling the mouse the whole time.
I KNEW IT!
I bring up the mouse wiggling thing all the time when I’m sharing my screen at work. I get impatient with computers very easily, so I start wiggling and jiggling and doing figure 8s with my mouse cursor and say that “it makes the computer go faster.” Then I get to be distracted by telling someone how that used to be kiiinda true back in the good ol’ days of PS2 and single threaded cooperatively-multitasked operating systems (the fact that PS2 sends hardware interrupts still blows my mind a bit).
Funnily enough, I learned about it from a greybeard who did a stint at Novell. He’d constantly jiggle his mouse around while waiting for shit and I bet he was just waiting for me to ask him why he thought it made the computer “faster.”
Even for Windows, as shit as it is, this seems hard to believe.
Yeah, the only thing I could imagine would be that image loading/processing uses an optimized library, but a single color is (unlikely but possibly) implemented poorly as a loop over every pixel, with some egregious overhead.
Most likely shit post though…
Perhaps I’m just lost or the fool here, but wouldn’t it be usual that the overhead of spawning a thread would be much higher than just drawing the next pixel? If the post is true, could someone explain to me how a renderer with so much thread contention could optimize drawing on a CPU?
Yeah the explanation can’t be true. It would take a single thread like 0 milliseconds to render the background image. That must be a shitpost.
That being said, I can imagine the first part being true due to some random windows fuckery
Also the potential number of threads would be in the millions if you used the entire color pallette on your background (limited by your display resolution). Even if you aren’t approaching that, surely most backgrounds have color values in at least the tens of thousands even with color compression. That just moves the bottleneck to your number of cores. Even the thread switching alone would have astronomically more overhead than just having one thread render the whole background.
I’ll ask Dave. He’ll know.
sounds like shitpost material to me.
