Category Archives: Quadratic

Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 2

Posted on November 10, 2025 by brucedawson

This is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded (part 1 is here). In this half I work at four different companies in the Seattle area, make my mark, and then … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Floating Point, Investigative Reporting, Linux, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Symbols, uiforetw, Unicycling, Xbox 360, xperf | Tagged career, Cavedog, Google, Humongous, Microsoft, Valve | 20 Comments

What this blog is about

Posted on March 25, 2025 by brucedawson

I’ve recently told a few people that I write, that I have a blog, and then I try to describe what I write about. I’m kinda proud of some of the stuff that I’ve covered here on randomascii over the … Continue reading →

Posted in Fun, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic | Tagged summary | 1 Comment

Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time

Posted on February 16, 2021 by brucedawson

Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, Symbols | Tagged dawson's first law of computing, Quadratic | 21 Comments

O(n^2), again, now in WMI

Posted on December 8, 2019 by brucedawson

I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged complexity, ETW, O(n^2), performance, WMI | 23 Comments

63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions

Posted on October 20, 2019 by brucedawson

I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how often do you have … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged ETW, ntfs, wpa | 12 Comments

O(n^2) in CreateProcess

Posted on April 21, 2019 by brucedawson

So many possible introductions to this one: Windows 7: Sheesh, I sure am slow at creating processes Windows 10: Hold my beer… Or how about: A) How long does CreateProcess take on Windows? B) How long would you like it … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Quadratic, xperf | Tagged cfg | 14 Comments

Making Windows Slower Part 2: Process Creation

Posted on October 15, 2018 by brucedawson

Windows has long had a reputation for slow file operations and slow process creation. Have you ever wanted to make these operations even slower? This weeks’ blog post covers a technique you can use to make process creation on Windows … Continue reading →

Posted in Code Reliability, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic | Tagged Application Verifier, crashing, pageheap | 7 Comments

Making VirtualAlloc Arbitrarily Slower

Posted on August 5, 2011 by brucedawson

As part of my continuing exploration of things that are slower than they should be I recently came across a problem with VirtualAlloc. If you use the wrong flag with this function then, depending on how much memory you allocate, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Quadratic, xperf | Tagged virtualalloc | 20 Comments