If chips and discs use electrons to transmit, store and read information, and electrons can move at near light speed, why does a computer function so slowly sometimes? Can’t it process all the information within an indiscernible time duration without causing any visible lag? What causes the clog?
This is not the same scenario as Internet lag, because I searched in this subreddit and found answers that on the Internet, numerous small time intervals across the globe can accumulate and make a great mess, even at light speed. This question is relevant with local computing.
In: Engineering
Computers are made of microprocessors. They can do a limited number of calculations per second. While the speed of light is a factor, chips are built to be throttled at a set speed with a clock. This is why you see chips rated something like 2.1 GHz (two billion operations per second.)
The first thing to understand is those calculations are small. Like adding two numbers together. If you want to add four numbers together, that’s three operations.
These clock cycles have to be spent on many things. Loading a file, that’s one thing in human terms, but may take millions of operations.
In short, they start to add up. One problem you also have with Windows computers is Windows will try to do a security scan, virus scan, and download operating system updates when you boot up, which is a monstrous amount of tasks that might take 30 minutes to complete. Then your computer is “bogged down” by too many operations. The hard drive is the slowest part of the computer. Many file operations (like a scan) take lots of real time. If that process is not throttled, and tries to work as fast as possible, then everything else the computer wants to do (which also uses files), gets bogged down. This is where load balancing can make a big difference.
Getting bogged down. It’s not fun.
Sometimes that’s a flaw in the operating system. Sometimes it’s the users fault. Sometimes it’s bad timing.
This is going to be a tough one to ELI5 if you don’t have a very basic understanding of how a computer processes information. The electrons you’re asking about are energy but beyond that have very little to do with how the memory and chips work out complex problems.
It’s kind of like asking why an electric vehicle can’t go the speed of light. The gears of the vehicle are technically being powered by electrons, but that doesn’t give them infinite ability to turn. Same thing for a computer.
Imagine you could lay bricks at the speed of light but I asked you to build a tower to the moon. It would take a while. It’s tens of billions of bricks. And every brick close to the moon would take you over a second to get there and another to come back to earth for another.
Simple computer functions are made up of millions of instructions at a physical level. And they compete for space.
It adds up.
A CPU is made of billions of little switches. Those switches take time to turn on and off. In a modern CPU that can happen billions of times per second, but if it takes billions of switchings to do a complex calculation then that is still going to take several seconds to complete.
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