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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#131

Post by phil294 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #126

I ve always wondered why all computers don't have a "slow down" setting

They have, kind of, it's the energy save mode.

On Linux, (besides GPU) you'd set /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu$i/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq to cpuinfo_min_freq, for all $i. I always look for minimum (idling) CPU frequency in devices before buying them, but this info is almost never available. My laptop has a min freq of 800 MHz, but I would like to go even lower, to better test low performance devices and limit energy usage. In web dev, you can simply use chrome dev tools cpu throttling though

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#132

Post by LeonM »

watersb wrote: post #100

There are lots of good options for sub-$200 laptops at Wal Mart right now. ChromeBooks or little Windows machines. Every web dev should use one. I am fascinated by the low end options, you learn a lot about a system when it's pushed to its limits. Or maybe you learn even more about your pain threshold... I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. I don't rec…

> I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car.

It is, but probably for a different reason than you'd think. In automotive, the difficulty is not designing the car, but the facility to mass produce them. Elon found out the hard way. In his words: "it's trivial to design the machine, but it's hard to design the machine, that builds the machine". He is currently facing the same challenge with the production of the raptor engines for starship.

A million dollar low volume "hand made" car can be build by a small team, with relatively few resources. Operating a factory that produces thousands of affordable cars per day takes tens of thousands of people through the entire supply chain.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#133

Post by einpoklum »

zagrebian wrote: post #86
taeric wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain Gmail.

Thanks for reminding me why I use HTML Gmail instead. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

1. Please consider using a proper mail client:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients

2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#134

Post by pacifika »

l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

Thanks for this.

In addition it’s easy to forget until you learn a new technology that: first you learn how to solve a problem, then you learn all the ways to solve a problem, finally you learn how to best solve a problem.

This means that you need a good understanding to make performance focused solutions, it can simply be the case that most teams are learning to get there.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#135

Post by ggfgg »

In the sector I work in it’s probably better if you test your product on a crappy Citrix or Windows Terminal Server. They are always run by the lowest bidder.

I had to sit on a call where they had 32 users on a 32Gb EC2 node with each user running ten chrome tabs open each. The CPU was rammed at 100%, the RAM at 100% and the disk IO (page file) bashing the EBS hard.

The irony of this is they were RDPing into this piece of shit from their i7 laptops.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#136

Post by LeonM »

ehsankia wrote: post #39

Even more than crappy laptop, please please test your application on bad/degraded networks. So many apps completely glitch and breakdown in bad network environments.

This.

2 rules:

- Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc)

- Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong.

Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a graceful manner. It should at least give some feedback to the user that the operation failed.

You can emulate a slow internet connection in chrome devtools, though I find the experience not accurate. You can also just add a sleep() call somewhere in your local backend. Maybe inject a sleep() into your acceptance environment, and let the test team work through the scenarios with that sleep() call in place.

I've seen so many frontends that don't catch errors, and just show the spinner indefinitely. Or worse, show nothing at all. This is extremely confusing to less technical people.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#137

Post by chrismorgan »

throwaway2331 wrote: post #70
eatonphil wrote: post #3

Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.

T500/W500, 4GB of RAM. It's something like 13 years old, and ~$60. It can run almost every website that hasn't been web-dev'ed into oblivion. It balks at anything with memory leaks and inefficient CPU/GPU load. It can run YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (surprisingly, for the last). It can't run https://github.com/

> It can't run https://github.com/

It… what? I don’t know about Facebook, but GitHub is a good deal lighter than YouTube and Twitter. GitHub is one of the extremely few websites developed by a large number of people that aren’t atrociously resource-heavy and JavaScript-dependent.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#138

Post by rtpg »

einpoklum wrote: post #133
zagrebian wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reminding me why I use HTML Gmail instead. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.

Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search).

I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something.

A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach.

Signed: someone who has multiple email addresses, has tried all the fancy alternatives (fastmail etc) and who desperately wants this stuff to work because having 3 web tabs to check email is annoying.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#139

Post by jimnotgym »

hu3 wrote: post #74
cable2600 wrote: post #66

I use Cheap Acers for $150 they seem to run Windows 10 slow enough to be a craptop. They also run Linux just fine because Linux has less of an overhead. In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS.

I understand you started with "cheap" but don't generalize brands like this: > In Windows 10, Acer laptops have a huge CPU time working because it struggles to keep up with the main OS. My coleague has an Acer laptop with i9 processor, RTX 3080 and 64GB RAM running on Raid NVMEs. It's screamingly fast.

I would substitute the term 'Netbook'. Several brands make them along with Acer

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#140

Post by bullen »

I go one step further, all software I make is developed on Raspberry 2 (2W, JavaSE server) and 4 (7W, C/OpenGL client).

That way I don't have to worry about missing any performance beat!

Since energy prices are guaranteed to increase forever, I'm surprised this is not default behaviour.

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