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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#281

Post by grishka »

avereveard wrote: post #269
grishka wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can use websites to videoconferencing. > I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games. You sure can, but you probably shouldn't. These use cases are much better served by native apps. Shoehorning hypertext documents with macros into being applications will never come close to writing proper applications, in terms of both UX and pe…

What you talking about? App delivery trough browser is what enabled the low cost zero friction startup world you see today, and we're all better for it.

I don't want "low cost zero friction startup world", I want completed products that actually work, ffs.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#282

Post by FearlessNebula »

izacus wrote: post #164
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…

In my personal experience, even getting an average web dev to touch a slower Windows machine is mission impossible. The best you can hope is "ewww, this sucks so much and it's ugly, why would anyone do this" and then arrogant walk back to their 3000$+ MacBook to shovel more JS libraries into the website. I've literally not seen a single rockstart javascripter actually willingly try to test things on Windows, much les…

I mean can you really blame them? I frequently play tech support for many of my family members running Windows 10 without an SSD and it’s like pulling teeth it’s so slow.

Running Windows 10 with an SSD and 8+ GB of RAM is a different story and way better experience.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#283

Post by naniwaduni »

pronlover723 wrote: post #276
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…

I agree what testing on crappy hardware is a good thing BUT........... I think the industry has a problem selling underpowered computers in general. AFAIK it's the non-pros that need the a reasonably powerful computer. Maybe "powerful" is the wrong word but not the crappy $300 windows laptop running on a celeron or whatever the latest. My dad got some ~$500 HP all in one desktop and it's so underpowered as to be unus…

Even if you cut all the crap, it'd still be pretty hard to get away from the ground truth of which hardware is cheaper.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#284

Post by FearlessNebula »

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…

Often the trade off on those sub $200 laptops is a really poor screen and speakers and other things that make for a crappy experience.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#285

Post by einpoklum »

taeric wrote: post #245
einpoklum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when I could use emacs for email, I was quite happy. Unfortunately, I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account, so I haven't figured how to get that back, yet. App passwords aren't allowed on my account. I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.

> I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account

Well, Google has your email, to read and use and pass on, so I'm not quite sure what this "advanced protection" can mean.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#286

Post by normaler »

exikyut wrote: post #169
normaler wrote: post #128

I had a similar experience building a NAS on a SoC. Suddenly things like transport or at rest encryption are no longer perceived to be free but really limit your performance. First time I actually had to be concious about choosing appropriate ciphers and hashing algos and not just using defaults.

What config did you end up setting with, if you happen to have the info easily to hand? I might be able to speed up SSHing to some of the slower hardware I have here. Also, I'm very curious what SoC this was.

It is/was a RockPro64 with 4GB oft RAM.

The biggest issue I had was with zfs native encryption using aes256-gcm per default.

The SoC has AES support but with gcm the hashing function is not AES based, so i had to change to aes256-ccm to profit from the AES support.

For sshd i severly limit available hmac and cipher to use chacha20 but i also force that in the client side.

I will post the relevant lines tomorrow.

Wireguard is also costing much more CPU performance then I am used to.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#287

Post by tk90 »

One time I was working in a co-working space with terrible internet (<5mbps). It was OK until I had to order lunch from Sweetgreens - their site was so CSS/JS heavy that I couldn't even load the page to order my salad. Made me laugh at how ridiculous it was.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#288

Post by animal_spirits »

mwcremer wrote: post #89
animal_spirits wrote: post #85

> 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…

You are thinking of Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald

Yes, thank you. Now I know where this came from!

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#289

Post by rovr138 »

killingtime74 wrote: post #264
paxys wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That throttles the internet bandwidth, not CPU, memory, disk reads/writes or any other constraints that lower-priced hardware will have.

It’s true but as an approximation it’s pretty good no?

CPU cores, cpu frequency, available memory, disk read/write speed all affect performance too.

CPU cores and available memory can be limited via a VM. CPU frequency, and disk speeds can't. 5200RPM disk vs SSD/NVME is a HUGE difference. If it's swapping often on a 5200RPM, that's a significant slowdown.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#290

Post by rovr138 »

Ekaros wrote: post #229
everyone wrote: post #40

HN is so full of rich silicon valley assholes, they've never even had to make do with a cheap laptop. They need an article like this to remind them how the proles live.

Now if only they had decent desktop screens... I have gigabit internet and powerful desktop, with enough ram... But still they don't develop for my 1440p screen, but some crappy tablets...

Analytics provides a lot of insight into that. Not so much CPU/RAM/disk speeds
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