Bunpro on a 14 year old ultrabook :-)

Bunpro
#1

Disclaimer: this posting is not meant as criticism or bug report, it’s just for fun! I don’t think very old and slow hardware is really relevant.

After migrating my systems from Windows to Linux and getting an enormous performance boost on my hardware I started a little fun project and revived my old but still beautiful MacBook Air 11" from 2010. I replaced the dead battery with a new one, upgraded the old 128GB ssd to 1TB, bought a little USB-C-to-Magsafe adapter and installed Fedora 40 with KDE and Wayland on it. The display is still stuck at 1366x768, the RAM at 4GB (hey, at least half of the size of some Macs from 2024! :slight_smile: ) and the wifi at 802.11n.

The overall performance is not great but surprisingly usable and much faster than the last supported macOS version.

Today I installed the browser Vivaldi that I use exclusively for all language learning stuff and tried out Bunpro.

The layout works really well on the tiny screen! I expected that I have to scroll a lot but the review screen fits just fine. Nice!

Performance is not great, animations like fading in and out run at maybe 10 fps. But they are fast and it’s no problem. Some pages take quite long to load but as soon as the reviews are running everything is usable and not annoying to use.

But the fan… oh boy… I didn’t knew how loud that MacBook Air can get, the fan must be running on maximum speed all the time and it still gets quite hot. The poor Core 2 Duo has quite a lot to do (the browser has between 120 and 150% load, 200% would be the maximum as it has two cores). Kind of interesting as I don’t have that problem on other websites (I’m writing this on the MacBook here in the forum and the fan is now nearly off). I also would have expected that the cpu load will settle down a bit when I’m stuck on a card and thinking about the 50 versions how you can negate a sentence and which one Bunpro wants from me but the load is staying high all the time without me doing anything.

Well, interesting experience, I’m now thinking about using that laptop for performance tests in my own projects. :slight_smile:

And again, I don’t expect any improvements. That device is just really slow, my passively cooled and also quite slow Pentium N5000 laptop is blazingly fast in comparison and I will keep doing my reviews on it anyway.

10 Likes
#2

You’ve made a new game to get your 勉強 finished before it overheats and shuts down!

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#3

this experience sunds like a mid range 2022 laptop trying to run windows 11. lol.

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#4

Very good info!

I’m also wondering why there are performance issues with the site :thinking:

I’m thiiiinking it might be because we use a JS library called Framer Motion to do some animations that some pure and simple CSS could solve.

On my to-do list to get rid of!
Thanks for the experimentation :joy:
And happy studying :nerd_face:

2 Likes
#5

That model has an nvidia 320m gpu, doesn’t it? Did you get the nvidia driver to work? Maybe it’s only using Intel integrated graphics, that could explain a lot of visual performance issues.

1 Like
#6

The Core 2 Duos didn’t have an integrated gpu yet. :slight_smile: So it definitely uses the Nvidia gpu because there is no other gpu.

I’m using the open source driver though. In my first installation I activated the repository for the proprietary Nvidia driver and that trashed the system in a way that it was easier to reinstall it. I’ll do some research whether the proprietary driver actually supports this ancient gpu.

But besides having the screen output completely screwed up during boot and a few blinking pixels on the right side of the screen everything works just fine. The load is also coming from the cpu, I can see that in htop. And it’s only when I‘m on the dashboard or in the reviews of Bunpro, other websites don’t cause such a high cpu load (without ads). Maybe I’ll debug it just for fun to see where all the cpu cycles go during idle.

But it’s just a fun project anyway, I don’t intend to use it regularly. Maybe just as a little travel pc because even after today’s standards it’s a really light, tiny and pretty device.

No USB3 and no H.265 hardware support is a bit tough though.

2 Likes
#7

I guess it has something to do with updating something visually. Because a while ago I noticed that on my normal desktop pc (a Core i7 with six cores) the fan is a little bit louder if I have Bunpro open and visible.

As soon as I just minimize it or switch to an empty tab the fan only makes it usual idle noise. I don’t have to close the tab.

Browsers usually stop updating the output if it can’t be seen anyway. But they still do other stuff like executing http requests, listening to events etc.

That was also recognizable in taskmanager where I checked what causes the higher fan speed. Vivaldi had more cpu load when Bunpro was open, as soon as I minimized the browser windows, switched the tab or closed the Bunpro tab the cpu load dropped by around 2%.

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#8

The CPU does not, integrated graphics would have been part of the chipset. I don’t know if the Macbook Air has an Intel gpu or if the 320m completely replaces it. But high CPU load and slow fading kind of point to an issue with hardware acceleration.

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#9

As I said the Nvidia gpu is the only gpu that device has. Hardware acceleration is active. The device is just very slow, even the hardware accelerated animation of Qt6 rarely run with 60 fps and there are stutters everywhere but that was already like that with MacOS X when I bought it in 2010. These were the early years of compositing and hardware accelerated window managers (Windows had it since Vista, OSX since 10.4). A few years later everything was much better.

The animations are not really a problem, the problem is the high cpu load when only the question of a review or the dashboard is shown. Nothing is animated there.

But on hardware like that browsers are always kind of crappy. Browser are the most demanding casual applications nowadays. That MacBook Air is probably on the performance level of a Raspberry Pi 4. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#10

Hey, nice! Someone beat me running Bunpro on my 2011 Thinkpad X220 勉強station :slight_smile:

The slowest thing for me is the confetti animation when you’re done for the day, but even that runs reasonably well. And the idle CPU load is more around 5%-ish. But I guess this i7 is much faster than a Core 2 Duo.

I also appreciate all the Linux otaku example sentences by the way :smiley:

1 Like