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Slow Software

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Re: Slow Software

#191

Post by ploxiln »

sb8244 wrote: post #61
ploxiln wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It looks pretty standard ... it does have GitHub integration enabled, and custom fields and workflow for each project, which seems like a pretty standard thing for organizations/users to do.

But my key anecdote is about loading the notifications sidebar after the page has loaded, there shouldn't be any customizations in there. But I dunno, maybe Jira gives managers a bit too much rope with which to hang their development teams.

Re: Slow Software

#192

Post by carapace »

I recently switched to an OpendBSD machine with no mouse. I have a large screen and use tmux-- no X windows --and a clicky gamer's keyboard. It's soooo nice.

The only downside so far is that about ~%60 of the WWW sucks through Lynx... I have a separate machine on my desk that's basically a Firefox and VSCode kiosk now. But I've gotten a dead-tree hardcopy book on Vim...

Re: Slow Software

#193

Post by keldaris »

gitgud wrote: post #161
keldaris wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you just disable animations on Apple devices the way you can on Android?

Yes, I think low power mode disables almost all animations on apple

Wouldn't that also disable other features as well (push notifications, maybe?)? Animations are something I disable permanently just to have a better user experience, I wouldn't like to sacrifice anything else.

Re: Slow Software

#194

Post by dnate »

Aeolun wrote: post #21
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…

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.

We have been using jira as a very simple issue tracker with 3 users and the standard backlog, selected for development, done workflow.

Load times are atrocious. It's the slowest website I have ever seen. Maybe facebook is slower, but I don't use that as often.

Re: Slow Software

#195

Post by leowoo91 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #19
leowoo91 wrote: post #12

I hope devs can fix the racing wheel latency first, so we can enjoy those racing games.

Which racing wheel have you tried? Was it implemented as a HID device (subject to the polling rate limitations described in the article) or with its own driver?

I didn't buy single one since I have seen many youtube videos, all seem to have latency (yep, HID device). By latency I mean, when you throw steer, you can see it reflects about 1/3 second to the gameplay. It is very hard to blame slowest part, probably the game itself, but I really wish that would be solved.

Re: Slow Software

#196

Post by fredley »

dandare wrote: post #160

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prior…

Office on Mac is garbage - I had someone told me that it remains single-threaded on Mac which would explain this.

I find my Pixel (v1) surprisingly fast given its age and have no plans to replace it currently, although the share menu slowness is weird. It happens any time the device has to enumerate the list of installed apps—like loading the apps page in settings—, which bizarrely it doesn't seem to cache.

Re: Slow Software

#197

Post by MaxBarraclough »

majewsky wrote: post #141
icebraining wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I heard an anecdote about how Minecraft got much slower when Notch (the original developer) turned it over to a team of employees. The new team did some refactoring, e.g. instead of calling functions like doWork(int x, int y, int z) they refactored that into doWork(Coordinate c) and that's when Minecraft started eating RAM like some sort of delicious candy, because now each time you deal with a new Coordinate, it's o…

Was `Coordinate` a class or a struct? C# structs generally [0][1] don't force use of the garbage-collected heap.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2010/09/30/the-... (ignore the usual comments telling the reader they are wrong for wondering about whether the garbage-collected heap is used)

[1] https://jacksondunstan.com/articles/3453

Re: Slow Software

#198

Post by xtracto »

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…

Something similar happened to a designer I was working with: The guy had his Apple Retina display Super-duper whatever, which he used to design.

At some point, he went to a developer screen to see how his designs were looking once implemented in code, and his first comment was "Why are the colors looking so bad?" ... Well, apparently the colors he chose looked great on his retina display but did not look that good on the average hardware.

After that day, we had to give him a second "normal" monitor so that he tested his designs for the layman user.

Re: Slow Software

#199

Post by jancsika »

Why aren't ads a data point in the infographic?

Ads are a necessary component of the web atm. They typically insert a delay between the user's action (clicking a button, scanning paragraphs of text with one's eyes) and the desired behavior (watching a video, comprehending which text is the article vs. advertising pictures and/or text).

So a Youtube app running on Fuschia could become a poster child for "anti slow software" based on the author's guidelines. Yet this would only deliver the user more quickly to the problem of ad latency-- a problem which is orders of magnitude worse UX than the problems listed in the article.

It seems like inside baseball to make ad latency an externality to the core problems of slow software.

Re: Slow Software

#200

Post by Liskni_si »

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…

Our team is responsible for deployment/operations of our self-hosted Jira so a few months ago I decided to make it faster, and oh what a rabbit hole that was:

When you look at Jira using Chrome DevTools there are these big batch.js and batch.css files (up to 5MB in total) that are different for every type of Jira view (dashboard, agile board, issue detail, issue search, …) so the first few page loads might be a bit slow but then they all should be cached as they don't change until you update your Jira and everything should be smooth. Except that wasn't what I saw, they seemed to be reloaded every hour or something.

Naturally I blamed Jira, and wasted hours Googling for batch.js not being cached, but eventually came to the conclusion that it can't be Jira's fault, and it isn't. Turns out it's the Google Chrome's cache backend that's used on Linux (and only there). There are three issues with it:

1. it's limited to cca 320MB even if you've got 1TB free space

2. entries are evicted by age times size, ignoring number of hits

3. media files such as 2MB youtube fragments use the same cache

The result is that watching youtube for a while evicts all cached batch.js. To make this bearable, I enabled gzip in the reverse HTTP proxy in front of Jira, which brought batch.js down to 500KB so that it's smaller than the youtube fragments and isn't evicted sooner than those. Still, few hours of watching youtube and not visiting Jira evicts it. Increasing the cache size using "google-chrome --disk-cache-size=2000000000" helps as well.

Oh and here's the link to Chromium issue tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=617620 :-)

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