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Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

61–70 of 272 posts

Re: Slow Software

#61
post #44
post #5

I think this article places too much emphasis on input devices and hardware constraints, and not enough on software architecture. JIRA doesn't really feel any faster just because your input devices are fast; the application level latency dwarfs the input latency by a large margin. I would take measurements, but JIRA prohibits benchmarking for some reason... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they're probably just trying to save everyone else…

Jira is in a league of its own. With latest stable Firefox on a Macbook Pro from 2014, I get a full 10 seconds loading time for the notifications sidebar. Every click in Jira takes between 5 and 15 seconds. It is absolutely nuts and it seems like many people just don't understand how insanely bad it is (but obviously many engineers do ;) Meanwhile my browser can load, render, and scroll a 4000 line colored diff in le…

Is your jira heavily customized? I haven't seen this level of slowness and use it daily. I know that customizations can be the root of evil on jira

Re: Slow Software

#62

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…

Microsoft Defender typically doesn't hurt performance or security much. The alternative is to run Mac or Linux stacks instead of a Windows stack, of course.

Re: Slow Software

#63

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 went into construction, and then industrial alpinism with tree-trimming inclination starting 2016.

But before I did that, the one-before-the-last place I've tried to work was this hostile environment where everything was Windows and MS-based, as far as what we were meant to use for work. I couldn't bring my own lappy.

I ended up writing an AutoHotkey script that would get mouse scrolling about 80% sane and manage my clipboard.

I set up a VM on our HPC cluster, on which I'd do my actual work by way of VNC and sometimes SSH. The LAN was OK, so it ended up being less laggy than Windows on my local machine.

But I suppose a local Q frontend to a VM hosted on my work lappy would have worked too. Virtualize the AV away, yeah.

Cheers.

Re: Slow Software

#64

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.

This is rather painful for me, especially when you don't notice and slow down for it to catch up, and it begins to drop characters.

I'm not talking latency with the keyboard - I'm talking voice input when the receiver hits latency. If I'm using voice, I generally can't see the screen.

It's a source of infuriating spell-checking. When C int becomes nt.

Re: Slow Software

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Microsoft Defender typically doesn't hurt performance or security much. The alternative is to run Mac or Linux stacks instead of a Windows stack, of course.

While running a Linux stack may still work, your Mac info is outdated by three years, at least. Macs have entered the zoo in 2015.

Re: Slow Software

#66
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.

In theory, AMP pages should all load instantly, and most news websites have AMP pages.

A lot of HNers hate AMP for other reasons, though; I think mostly Google's insistence on using their CDN for it, and for whitelisting mostly their own scripts for use in AMP.

Re: Slow Software

#67
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.

A couple news sites have 'text-based' versions. Became popular as a way to give people in disaster areas with spotty signal a chance to find things out.

These are some I found:

[0] https://lite.cnn.io/en

[1] http://thin.npr.org/

Re: Slow Software

#68
post #52

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…

What is extremely annoying is when I get used to this "getting ahead" dance, but every once in a while chrome would just ignore what I typed and I would have to go back and retype it.

Re: Slow Software

#69

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.

What’s worse is when the application drops events during that time.

Main offender for me is chrome, so much lost typing in new tabs and windows

Re: Slow Software

#70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Defender typically doesn't hurt performance or security much. The alternative is to run Mac or Linux stacks instead of a Windows stack, of course.

While running a Linux stack may still work, your Mac info is outdated by three years, at least. Macs have entered the zoo in 2015.

For practical purposes, that's not true.

Macs do not allow running unsigned software by default, and no one runs antivirus on Mac, ever. So even if they were commonly being infected, which they aren't, the person above would have organizational indemnity if someone were infected because they're following industry best practices by not running antivirus on Mac.

If you want, you can further restrict Macs to only App Store software, which is heavily sandboxed. Then you can go even further by not allowing the individual users to install software on their own, if you really want to be draconian about it.

Unless someone is being individually targeted, running very outdated software, or is intentionally trying to get themselves infected, it will not happen. Even if all three conditions are true, it's still very unlikely.

Anyone who says otherwise is just fear mongering. That same level of fear mongering could point to the dozens of pieces of malware that have been released for Linux.

I say this as someone who uses a Linux laptop for work and a Windows desktop at home. I don't have a dog in this fight. I do, however, try to stay very informed about the state of software security.

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