Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 272 posts

Re: Slow Software

#111

Post by teekert »

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…

Pff, my entire hard drive is scanned every friday. Friday is slow day on my work laptop (Win10 with McAfee)...

At home I run KDE Neon, when people see me use that laptop (1 y/o Asus, core i5, 8 gb ram, standard ssd) they always comment how snappy and fast everything is and ask me what laptop I use. Even my neighbor with his brand new Win10 desktop with NVMe drive and new i7 cpu.

Re: Slow Software

#112

Post by icebraining »

phtrivier wrote: post #103

> We hope this material is helpful for you as you work on your own software. Sadly, as interesting as the material in the article is (great to learn about the measured latencies of the hardware part), I fail to see much that is "actionnable" for a run-of-the-mill software developper. It seems the only advice is "don't download ad / tracking / social media - related stuff", but even that is not exactly in the developp…

The author doesn't say you should use a language without GC, but minimize its effects. There are techniques to avoid GC churn by reducing allocations and the subsequent cleanups.

Re: Slow Software

#113

Post by namanyayg »

LandR wrote: post #100
Moru wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still exists with todays computers and systems? I remember back in school (a long time ago) we had computers that was so slow it took 7 seconds for the backspace key to start doing something on some of the computers. This was in the 286 age with windows 3.11 I believe. I haven't seen it much since then. What in the world are you using to have this experience?

My work laptop is an i7 with 16GB RAM and I sometimes see this delay in inputs when running Visual Studio. I type a line of code then wait a few seconds for it to appear. Weird thing is when it does this, I'm not using all the memory and the CPU is normally sitting way below 50%. I've no idea why it sometimes just gets unusably slow.

I had the same thing, I uninstalled GitLens which fixed it (or at least made it rarer). Might be one of your plugins?

Re: Slow Software

#114

Post by petepete »

pjmlp wrote: post #81
coder543 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 St…

In many enterprises you are only allowed to connect laptops into the network if an anti-virus is present, that includes company issued Macs.

And this is why I used to have a laptop in my drawer I used for logging into the proper intranet, booking holidays and organising my pension.

All my actual work was done on Unix/Unix-like machines on our own old network, something we clung on to after acquisition.

Re: Slow Software

#115

Post by golergka »

coder543 wrote: post #72
__mifflin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and no one runs antivirus on the Mac, ever. Working at a large company (also not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies) and if you get a macbook, they are managed remotely and have BitDefender installed.

I sometimes forget how much big companies enjoy spending money. I once worked for a large company where every developer was issued a full copy of Microsoft Office, even though most of them worked inside a fullscreen Linux VM all day. Outlook was the only piece of Office that my coworkers and I used, and I would have been happier using a tab open to a webmail provider inside the VM than having to use Outlook to connec…

If you're working in the game industry, and your repository includes a lot of huge binary files that are mergable, perfoce is a godsend.

Also, p4merge is the best merging utility for any VCS, and I always install it alongside git if I work in Windows.

Re: Slow Software

#116

Post by AnonC »

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this usage is across many processes (whose names I don’t understand), not just McAfee.

Since it’s a work image of Windows, it has policies set to prevent me from changing many things.

Where do I even start troubleshooting this issue and finding the culprits? Is it just a CPU usage issue and/or some kind of I/O issue? I haven’t yet tried using something like Process Explorer (from the sysinternals tools) to get a clearer idea of what’s happening (though I’m not sure if that’d help).

I’m thinking of putting Linux on it as an alternative.

Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.

Re: Slow Software

#117

Post by raptorfactor »

AnonC wrote: post #116

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this us…

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/

Re: Slow Software

#118

Post by jack_pp »

AnonC wrote: post #116

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this us…

You could try swapping the ssd with a new one with a fresh install of windows or even try dual booting a fresh install of windows to see if it's a software issue after all.

Re: Slow Software

#119

Post by p2detar »

coder543 wrote: post #29
Aeolun wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to be fair, plain Jira can be pretty fast, it’s just when you get into an enterprise environment and people think they need 2000 different fields things fall apart.

I've never seen JIRA be "pretty fast", so I can't agree. I also think "2000 different fields" is an unfair exaggeration, if we're going to focus on being fair. The 10 to 20 fields that people might use per issue should not prevent JIRA from being fast with the right architecture.

I've setup Jira (on premise) at my workplace myself. Runs behind an nginx reverse proxy and it is indeed pretty fast!

We don't use much stuff and it's a bit older version 7.8, but I cannot complain so far.

Re: Slow Software

#120

Post by LolNoGenerics »

ploxiln wrote: post #44
coder543 wrote: 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…

At least we're getting paid well for watching load indicators. Atlassian should make a step forward and show funny cat gifs to increase satisfaction.
Post reply on HN