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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#111

Post by dx034 »

mattlondon wrote: post #79

I think a lot of the perceived slowness is now the fact that so much more is reliant on the network now - and more often than not requires several hops over the public internet to some data centre somewhere. As a reminder - network is really really slow compared to pretty much anything else: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l... I'd not be surprised if the author's library search terminal fr…

Network latency can be one reason but I found the lack of optimisation to be a bigger factor. As long as a programme somehow works many developers won't try to optimise it. That gives us Electron apps which are easily 10x slower than a comparable native app (pgAdmin is a prime example).

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#112

Post by buckminster »

dagss wrote: post #6
glial wrote: post #2

Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…

You have it on the head. The tasks we pick for computing are the ones that can be completed in seconds. There is plenty of interesting computation we could and would do if what now requires a year would only require a second.

I've experienced this. My first computer managed about 100 flop/s, or 3 Gflop/year. A modern PC can do that year's work in a millisecond! Yet when my current computer struggles to display a web page there isn't much interesting computation going on.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#113

Post by jkoll »

debaserab2 wrote: post #99
samstave wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... I may be - I’ll check when I get to work, I maybe have made a mindflake as I was pissed that chrome had so much allocated when it should be small given its job...

Turns out building a standards compliant DOM rendering and JavaScript is actually pretty complex. When you throw in the heaps and heaps of different features that must follow volumes of specs, backwards compatibility with previous implementations, and cross platform compatibility I think it’s pretty safe to say that your average modern browser is one of the most, if not the most complex program installed on your mach…

250 megabytes for a simple email client.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#114

Post by ams6110 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #12
fallingfrog wrote: post #3

This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!

I don't get your point about typing phone numbers. When I was being taught to touch-type in first and second grade, my teachers told me that I should type on the top row, not the numeric keypad. Not sure why. Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back? Anyway, to me, typing numbers on the top row is not an obvious problem.

The touch-typing course was probably developed 50 years ago for typewriters, which don't have numeric keypads.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#115

Post by CGamesPlay »

owenversteeg wrote: post #63

It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…

> some code from Stackoverflow that iterates over your DOM in O(n!^n!)

OK, I'm curious. What's a legitimate problem where the most naive solution is O(n!^n!)?

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#116

Post by loxs »

tome wrote: post #104
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?

Only if you jailbreak

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#117

Post by owenversteeg »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #115
owenversteeg wrote: post #63

It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…

> some code from Stackoverflow that iterates over your DOM in O(n!^n!) OK, I'm curious. What's a legitimate problem where the most naive solution is O(n!^n!)?

That was a joke, honestly I doubt anything would be that slow. There are a few algorithms that are O(n!) though.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#118

Post by sp332 »

danaliv wrote: post #96
sp332 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)

Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?

Because... it's not at all the same application? Email used to keep everything on disk and load up one message at a time. Now everything is on the server and has images embedded, so it all gets cached into RAM. If I switch to the "HTML version" of Gmail, the tab takes only 3MB to list my emails.

There's also inflation of the content itself. That same HTML view uses over 100MB to render one email with a lot of pictures.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#119

Post by aeorgnoieang »

fusiongyro wrote: post #39

In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…

> I think pretty much everything in computing is like this.

But then there's Dwarf Fortress, Blender, Vim, Emacs, ...

Accounting for Sturgeon's Law, things aren't quite so bleak.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#120

Post by pmlnr »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

You do, in fact, have a choice, you always did, everyone does. There are decent, completely offline solutions (Libreoffice vs GDocs), you can self-host a lot of things and do a private "cloud" on a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop (https://yunohost.org/#/ ; https://cloudron.io/ ; etc). The tradeoff is compatibility and not being trendy. However, that has always been a problem both the 80s and the 90s. Mac vs PC? Amiga vs anything?

A lot has changed since and a lot has become more comfortable. It slower, more complicated, much more annoying. But you do have the power to simply stop using whatever you dislike[1].

So: don't buy from google. Build you own cloud. If you don't like the application or if it's instable (atom), use something stable (vim?). It _will_ be uncomfortable, but it's there.

[1] I'm well aware the cost of, for example, refusing to use Facebook, but you still can refuse to use it, whereas life without WeChat in Asia is becoming near impossible.

EDIT: Sorry for possible misunderstandings, I mixed up 3 different topics in a way too short answer. My point is: there are alternatives, there are choices. You don't like the user interface of something, protest: use something else. There _are_ options, but they are not the most visible, not the most comfortable choices, and many of them will involve setting services up for yourself.

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