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Slow Software

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Re: Slow Software

#51

Post by akvadrako »

mbell wrote: post #40
tyingq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheap androids aren't so shabby these days. A Moto G5 play is a quad core 1.4GHz with 2GB of ram. No speed demon, but is reasonable. $109.99 on Amazon, unlocked.

Javascript/web performance on Android is universally bad but truly awful on the low end. A Moto G5 pulls ~14 on speedometer 2.0 which puts it in line with an iPhone 5/5s (5-6 year old devices). An iPhone XS scores around 123 in this benchmark for comparison, ~9 times faster.

I concur, having just purchased a Nokia 5 (for €105) and being surprised it felt so much slower than my iPhone SE. I guess it's a sign that speed/$ is flattening out. The good part about it is devices will stay competitive longer.

Re: Slow Software

#52

Post by Shank »

robochat wrote: post #16

My least favorite type of latency is when you start typing and the application takes at least 1 - 2 seconds to catch up with you. This still happen to me often enough to be a normal occurrence on both my desktop computer and phone.

You know what, I'm actually more okay with this than perceptible, constant latency. If nothing is happening then I know I can just stop looking for characters to appear and keep typing. A tiny part of me loves to "get ahead" and just keep going because I know it'll be magical when it does arrive. If it's just always laggy, though, it's disorienting and disconnects me much worse.

Now if it's always doing that -- like a 1-2 second delay more than a few times in 10 minutes, for instance, it's terrible. But if it's a one-off, I don't mind it.

Re: Slow Software

#53

Post by Shank »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #3

> Android and iOS both make substantial use of "long press" to access context menus, which require that the user wait hundreds of milliseconds in the middle of their command gestures. > A related source is delays for disambiguation. For example, on mobile Safari there's a default 350ms delay between when the user taps a link and when the browser begins fetching the new page, in order to tell the difference between a…

> I really wish mobile devices had one or two modifier buttons on the side.

Look, I feel you in terms of lost functionality, but I don't when it comes to trying to explain how these systems work to my family. Android was notoriously bad because the back stack behaved totally sane to programmers, and insane to everyone else. When Android had a "menu" button on the bottom too, it was another source of confusion. "What does the menu button do?" Thinking back further, I know for a fact my mom didn't even know her phone had a trackball on it (hiya Android 2.x era), but she was mystified when I told her what it was and what it did.

I'd rather someone fix the design problem of mapping taps to different things than add more buttons that are impossible to explain.

Re: Slow Software

#54

Post by turrini »

Somebody once posted a well known news website with an alternate link that loaded instantly. Anyone remember this? I don't remember if it was WSJ, or NYT or something else.

Re: Slow Software

#55

Post by flukus »

voltagex_ wrote: post #18

I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…

The machine you posted is pretty typical of PC gamers according to the steam user survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=combined). 8GB+ of RAM only got to 50% of users a couple of years ago. I suspect most non-pc gamers machines to be even worse, the firefox survey has 30% of people still on 4GB: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware .

> I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.

Agreed, I think MS are dogfooding exclusively on surface books.

Re: Slow Software

#56

Post by throwaway286 »

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without anti-virus.

Re: Slow Software

#57

Post by silviogutierrez »

throwaway286 wrote: post #56

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without…

I'm currently picking the OS stack for all machines at my company. All guidance, even people I respect, point towards antivirus protection. Yet I lean towards nixing that. I know it's hugely ineffective. In fact, it opens up holes of its own[1].

And yet... it's like scaffolding in NYC[2]. Absolutely useless[3]. But if you are all for removing it, and a brick falls and hurts someone, heads will roll. Quite a quandary I - and other C-levels - face.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089872/security/secur... [2] Another contrarian passion of mine. [3] Bricks do fall and hurt people. But no more than scaffolding itself falls with the same effect.

Re: Slow Software

#58

Post by wingerlang »

Shank wrote: post #52
robochat wrote: post #16

My least favorite type of latency is when you start typing and the application takes at least 1 - 2 seconds to catch up with you. This still happen to me often enough to be a normal occurrence on both my desktop computer and phone.

You know what, I'm actually more okay with this than perceptible, constant latency. If nothing is happening then I know I can just stop looking for characters to appear and keep typing. A tiny part of me loves to "get ahead" and just keep going because I know it'll be magical when it does arrive. If it's just always laggy, though, it's disorienting and disconnects me much worse. Now if it's always doing that -- like…

> A tiny part of me loves to "get ahead" and just keep going because I know it'll be magical when it does arrive

Same here! My old laptop did this and it was a thrill to see how much you could write before it started coming in at lightning speed.

Re: Slow Software

#59

Post by saratogacx »

turrini wrote: post #54

Somebody once posted a well known news website with an alternate link that loaded instantly. Anyone remember this? I don't remember if it was WSJ, or NYT or something else.

Likely not what you had in mind but news.yahoo.com is amazingly quick to load for me.

Re: Slow Software

#60

Post by eikenberry »

throwaway286 wrote: post #56

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without…

> I really just want to work somewhere without anti-virus.

Not trying to be hostile.. but why aren't you? I've never worked anywhere that required anti-virus, so I know there are jobs out there that don't require it. In recent years I've gone so far as to take the stance that I won't use company computers at all, only my own, and I still haven't had any problems finding work.

Unless you have strict restrictions on switching jobs (eg. H1B, can't move for reasons, bad network connections so no remote work, etc.) nothing should keep you from finding better working conditions.

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