[danudey]

I was testing a pre-release version of one of our products at work, and it was causing (inadvertently) massive slowdowns periodically due to a naive approach to scanning a system for installed applications.

So, I did what any sane devops engineer would do; I throttled the CPU use limit for its cgroup in the systemd service file. Now no more scans.

Except now the UI wouldn't load. Couldn't figure out why. Just an empty white window. Turns out, it's running a node.js server and the whole UI is rendered in HTML/CSS/JS, but because of that it was so non-performant that the UI would effectively not render at all if it couldn't slam your CPU.

I can't think of any native-code, native-widget, control-panel-type UI that would completely fail to render the entire window at all if limited to 10% CPU time, but hey, here we are.

[vosper]

> it was causing (inadvertently) massive slowdowns periodically due to a naive approach to scanning a system for installed applications.

> Turns out, it's running a node.js server and the whole UI is rendered in HTML/CSS/JS, but because of that it was so non-performant that the UI would effectively not render at all if it couldn't slam your CPU.

So was it the naive approach to system scanning, or the web-based UI that was the problem? Because there are some performant desktop applications using web rendering, like VS Code. Though I'm not sure how VSCode would behave if limited to 10% of CPU, because that's kind of a weird scenario.