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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#431

Post by Retric »

maccard wrote: post #429
Retric wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Login screen is hardly the end of the boot up process. I have had work laptops where I would login then go get a water because it’s going to take several minutes to finish loading.

My machine definitely doesn't take multiple minutes after login to load fully. I didn't count after that point because it's really the user (or administrators) fault after that point, and because I have a password which means I'd need to actually time startup, pause, and time login. Also, when do you consider "done"? How can I accurately measure that?

I consider the boot process down when the system is responsive. I can normally open notepad in under a second so IMO that’s a good benchmark for done.

As to being the users fault, that’s rather subjective. Video card, printers, and other drivers taking forever to load is really a hardware/OS issue.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#432

Post by kabdib »

DanBC wrote: post #390
kabdib wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when the OS was loaded off of a hard drive, the boot time was still about 2-3 seconds (I did measure this). Not really exceptional. It took maybe a minute to load off floppy disk. That is STILL shorter than the POST time for every machine I work with these days, with the possible exception of the Raspberry Pi in the closet.

Are the post times modifiable? I'm using a Dell E7440 and it's pretty quick to boot from powered off. I have a bunch of stuff turned off in the bios. It's my machine on my home network, it's not a corporate machine with all the corporate stuff. But maybe that's the lever we need to get change: 30 seconds extra for 1000 people over 250 working days a year is over 2000 person hours being spent waiting for machines to b…

For database servers with multiple TB of RAM, 10-15 minutes is not unusual for POST.

It's nuts. The memory was fine the last time it was tested (30 minutes ago, on the last reboot). Let's just train some buses, probe some address spaces and go, okay?

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#433

Post by jjeaff »

wnevets wrote: post #345
throwGuardian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An SSD can make a world of difference. Most of the time spent during boot up is in executing random reads (of about 4Kb size) from storage, and SSDs are a factor of magnitude faster there

SSD + Windows 10 + Fast Boot = seconds of boot time

I have win 10, fast boot and two nvme drives striping in raid 0. Boots in maybe 8 seconds.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#434

Post by p_l »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #347
mtm7 wrote: post #315

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try. I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don'…

I used to choose Eclipse over IntelliJ for similar reasons years ago. When it came to refactoring and other integrated features IntelliJ won, but Eclipse could do partial compilation on save and the run of a unit test automatically within moments, something which on IntelliJ invoked a Maven build that often took minutes. The performance of feedback and the speed with which you can go through the basic cycle of coding…

Interestingly enough I had kind of the opposite experience

Since I haven't done much with Java itself, the build times weren't as impactful on me.

What made a big change was how IntelliJ, despite being pure Swing GUI, was order of magnitude lower latency, from as simple things as booting the whole IDE, to operating on, well, everything.

Then I switched from Oracle to IBM J9 and I probably experienced yet another order of magnitude speedup.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#435

Post by curiouser2 »

ksec wrote: post #410
mtm7 wrote: post #315

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try. I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don'…

If I remember correctly, this is like the third comment I have read on HN in years that shows Sublime Text is faster than VSCode. I have been arguing about this since may be 2016 or earlier, on HN it was the echo chamber of how much faster VSCode is compared to Atom! I cant believe this is built on Electron etc. And with every VSCode update I tried and while it was definitely faster than Atom, it was no way near as f…

VSCode WebGL link - was enabled in one of the latest versions as an experimental feature for terminal: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41#_new-experimenta...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#436

Post by folmar »

ultrarunner wrote: post #360
romwell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is absolutely no excuse for the ridiculously high latency everywhere now. Want to give me fancy autocorrect? Fine. But first: * Make a UI with instant feedback, which doesn't wait on your autocorrect * Give me exact results instantly before your autocorrect kicks in * Run your fancy slow stuff in the background if resources are available * Update results when you get them... if I didn't hit "enter" and go…

Windows 10 search and macOS's spotlight do something like this. It's irritating when results reorder themselves milliseconds before I hit enter. Either way I'm not sure it rises to the level of indignation shown here.

It would not have a big deal to measure/guess your reaction time and wind back changes you had not chance to see.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#437

Post by folmar »

romwell wrote: post #388
ultrarunner wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 search and macOS's spotlight do something like this. It's irritating when results reorder themselves milliseconds before I hit enter. Either way I'm not sure it rises to the level of indignation shown here.

The only thing Windows 10 UI rises to is a paragon of lagginess - and I say that about the UI I generally like , and one that runs on 10-year-old equipment just fine. There's no good reason for a lag after hitting the "Start" button. There's no good reason for a lag in the right-mouse-button context menu in Explorer (this was a "feature" since Windows 95, however). I could go on for a long time, but let's just say th…

Just install Classic Shell (now Open-Shell). Resistance is futile.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#439

Post by ptx »

feanaro wrote: post #421
ptx wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're aware that standard GUIs (common 90s-style GUIs based on IBM's CUA[1] design) already do this. Every control can be assigned an access key[2] that allows you to access it with alt + some letter, with the letter indicated using an underscore. The trend lately seems to be to hide the underscore until you hold down alt for a while, which makes the feature much more difficult to use when you don't…

I was aware of this as a thing that programs often did but wasn't aware that this was a standard. Thanks! That said, I find that even when programs support this for accessing menus, they often do not support clicking buttons and focusing text boxes using it, so it could be taken further.

They can, and they often do (or used to). It works with both buttons and text boxes – the latter by connecting the text box to an adjacent label.

Have a look at some older piece of UI in Windows and hold down alt for a while. All we need for this to be taken further is for the programmer to pay a bit of attention to the existing feature and make use of it.

For a non-Windows example, I just looked at the XFCE appearance settings dialog. Hold down alt for a few seconds and you'll see that every single control has an access key: all the tabs, all the buttons, all the checkboxes, all the dropdowns.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#440

Post by feanaro »

ptx wrote: post #439
feanaro wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was aware of this as a thing that programs often did but wasn't aware that this was a standard. Thanks! That said, I find that even when programs support this for accessing menus, they often do not support clicking buttons and focusing text boxes using it, so it could be taken further.

They can, and they often do (or used to). It works with both buttons and text boxes – the latter by connecting the text box to an adjacent label. Have a look at some older piece of UI in Windows and hold down alt for a while. All we need for this to be taken further is for the programmer to pay a bit of attention to the existing feature and make use of it. For a non-Windows example, I just looked at the XFCE appearan…

I'm on Linux and I quickly tried some of my most commonly used software, such as Firefox and Deluge, but they did not seem to be supporting this, unfortunately. Only the menus get their access keys highlighted.
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