Should be pointed out you can simulate slower internet speeds in your chrome dev tools. The others- display/ram/cpu may be easier on a craptop, but a VM could also simulate resource constraints.
Test your product on a crappy laptop
191–200 of 321 posts
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to use Gmail for work. I've found Gmail to be pretty slow nowdays. From HN comments on other threads I'm not the only one to have noticed this. It even occasionally fails to load and just hangs at the loading screen requiring a refresh and fingers crossed that the second try succeeds in loading my inbox. When I return back to my personal email using FastMail the difference is like night and day it loads fast a…
Indeed, I have Outlook, Yandex and Gmail, and Gmail seems to be the worst of them all. I cannot understand all thr praise people give it, is it simply brand loyalty?
It used to be amazing - a pretty full featured mail application, snappy in 2005 on much less sophisticated browser runtimes. It’s relatively a piece of shit now.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#193Don’t forget to implement real user metrics like Sentry. I add in timing checks for critical features that log out to my analytics and have a regular habit of analyzing the data.
Your user base greatly influences what kind of performance optimization you should be doing. In some cases it’s worth it, but if your primary user has a fast machine, it’s generally not worth it. Reminds me of the time when I had a project manager who insisted on optimizing page load time for a heavy mapping application.
And if your app is a simple shopping cart or a few forms, you probably don’t need a JavaScript frontend framework. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve removed all the unnecessary React and Vue and increased performance by at least an order of magnitude.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#194I test all of my apps in the oldest-still-supported iPhone (currently the iPhone 6s) and optimize accordingly, carries over to Android performance (cross-platform apps) pretty nicely as well.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#195However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…
Kids who can't afford fancy computers grow up into rich adults who have no nostalgia towards your game franchise
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#196>> Powerful devices can become circumstantially slowed by multiple factors
The slowest device we test with is actually a very expensive Chromebook with severe thermal throttling issues. Using our WebGL app that runs fine on a low-end Chromebook tablet will bring this expensive Chromebook to its knees within minutes. It throttles down to like 600 MHz or something.
The worst part is that every tech reviewer seems to have one of these things in a drawer somewhere that they pull out for testing. The usual duty pattern of Chromebooks is very bursty, e.g. page loads, but sustained GPU usage just crushes this particular device.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#197However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…
Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.
There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#198> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…
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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#199> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…
We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never…
This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather statistics are those who think the product is pretty good, but there are just these small issues that they hope will get fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or statistics for you to analyze.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#200There 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…
producing something in a very high volume consistently is difficult.
my SO's father works in plastics manufacturing. they make tiny plastic housings used in cable connectors and tiny plastic balls for machine bearing seals.
both of these products have surprisingly high specification, and producing hundreds of thousands of them each day is a serious challenge.