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

Show HN: Avoid smooth spinners, use low-FPS spinners(nh2.me)

7 points by nh2 7 hours ago | 5 comments

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.

Diti 59 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

creatonez 4 minutes ago | |

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

Hah, I did not expect that. I can't imagine any end users will be able to name that one.

echoangle 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 1 hour 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.

jy14898 28 minutes ago | | |

I'm on mobile so I'm not able to check, but can the will-change and contain attributes reduce the cost?

nonamesleft 2 hours 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.