Show HN: Avoid smooth spinners, use low-FPS spinners

nnh2 about 6 hours ago 4 commentsRead Article on nh2.me

I got so annoyed by various apps (VScode, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird) burning CPU/GPU cycles and and making my laptop hot and sluggish with spinners on otherwise static content, that I made this little page to fight this.

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Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Diti•11 minutes ago

Those aren’t spinners (also called numeric updowns, see [1]). Those are throbbers (also called loading icons, see [2]).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinner_(computing)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber

echoangle•about 2 hours ago

Your claimed GPU usage seems really high for a simple spinner, even considering the CPU is pretty old. I wonder if there's some other problem going on with your setup.

nh2•39 minutes ago

I don't think so. This is just what happens when you redraw the screen.

Doing it 30x more frequent than needed costs more, no matter if it's only 1 pixel.

This problem is not isolated to me or to just one machine. Check out the chromium bug about the tab loading spinner, for example. It is a "simple" spinner as well.

Or the Zed editor, which spams screen redraws even when nothing changes at all, so it has high GPU usage for still picture.

nonamesleft•about 1 hour ago

I truly wish i could get everything to use the ticking clock one at 1Hz (or maybe 0.5) for spinners, animation in user interfaces causes me anguish in general, so i have to go around filtering them on webapps.