this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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At this rate, finding the last digit is probably just a few years down the road.

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[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I guess the Windows disk drivers are shit compared to Linux ones.

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

But what does calculating pi have to do with the disk speed?

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I imagine it's about checkpointing the calculation as it's very long.

Point is, if the system crashes, you want to be able to resume the calculation without losing too much progress, so you want to periodically write progress to disk.

That takes some CPU cycles away from the calculation, and if your disk driver is inefficient, it will take away more.

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

AHH ok yeah that does make some sense.

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 days ago

The question did too, it isn't immediately apparent why you'd write to disk to calculate pi if you haven't worked in a place that churned a lot of numbers before.

[–] Applesause@mander.xyz 4 points 4 days ago

It's a bottleneck. If you are calculating faster than you can record the results, you have to wait for the write operation to complete before you can do the next calculation.