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The computers are fast, but you don't know it

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Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#311

Post by tcfhgj »

kaba0 wrote: post #289
spatley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that switching to lower level languages give the potential of many orders of magnitude. But the thing that was most enlightening was that removing pandas made a 9900% increase in speed without even a change to language. 20 minutes down to 12 seconds is a very big deal, and I still don't have to remember how to manage pointers.

I don’t believe orders of magnitude is achievable in general. Even python, which is perhaps the slowest mainstream language clocks in at around 10x that of C. Sure, there will be some specialized program where keeping the cache manually small you can achieve big improvements, but most mainstream managed languages have very great performance. The slowdown is caused by the frameworks and whatnot, not the language itsel…

I tried counting a large amount of numbers based on a condition in a loop. 70 times difference between python3 and cargo run --release

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#312

Post by moffkalast »

antisthenes wrote: post #148
moffkalast wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, I cloned a Win10 installation on a HDD to a sata SSD a year or two back and the speed difference was considerable. Especially something like Atom that took minutes to open before was ready to go in like 10 seconds afterwards. A lot of things remained slow though.

The bigger question is why does a glorified text editor take 10 seconds to open on any system? Is it loading 2000 plugins?

Electron, that's why.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#313

Post by wbsss4412 »

pjvsvsrtrxc wrote: post #152
xupybd wrote: post #72

You also have to optimize for the constraints you have. If you're like me then development time is expensive. Is optimizing a function really the best use of that time? Sometimes yes, often no. Using Pandas in production might make sense if your production system only has a few users. Who cares if 3 people have to wait 20 minutes 4 times a year? But if you're public facing and speed equals user retention then no way…

> If you're like me then development time is expensive. Is optimizing a function really the best use of that time? Sometimes yes, often no. Almost always yes, because software is almost always used many more times than it is written. Even if you doubled your dev time to only get a 5% increase of speed at runtime, that's usually worth it! (Of course, capitalism is really bad at dealing with externalities and it makes…

Nitpick: software optimization isn’t an example of an externality. Externalities are costs/benefits that accrue to parties not involved in a transaction.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#314

Post by dilyevsky »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #309
porcoda wrote: post #11

Yup. We have gotten into the habit of leaving a lot of potential performance on the floor in the interest of productivity/accessibility. What always amazes me is when I have to work with a person who only speaks Python or only speaks JS and is completely unaware of the actual performance potential of a system. I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that ta…

I don't think we can really blame slow languages. Implementations of languages like javascript, ruby - and I would presume python and php - are a lot faster than they used to be. I think most slowness is architectural.

Js, php are faster; ruby, python not so much

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#315

Post by kllrnohj »

fleddr wrote: post #65
porcoda wrote: post #11

Yup. We have gotten into the habit of leaving a lot of potential performance on the floor in the interest of productivity/accessibility. What always amazes me is when I have to work with a person who only speaks Python or only speaks JS and is completely unaware of the actual performance potential of a system. I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that ta…

I think it's even stronger than a habit. When you're exposed to the typical "performance" of the web and apps for a decade or so, you may have forgotten about raw performance entirely. Young people may have never experienced it at all. I once owned a small business server with a Xeon processor, Linux installed. Just for kicks I wrote a C program that would loop over many thousands of files, read their content, sort i…

Shit performance is what happens when every response to optimizations or overhead is immediately answered with "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Or the always fun "profile it!" or "the runtime will optimize it" when discussing new language features and systems.

So often performance isn't just ignored, it's actively preached against. Don't question how that new runtime feature performs today or even dare to ask. No no no, go all in on whatever and hope the JIT fairy is real and fixes it. Even though it never is and never does.

There's a place for all the current tech, of course. Developer productivity can be more important at times. But it should be far more known what the tradeoffs are and rough optimization guides than there are.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#316

Post by kaba0 »

tcfhgj wrote: post #311
kaba0 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe orders of magnitude is achievable in general. Even python, which is perhaps the slowest mainstream language clocks in at around 10x that of C. Sure, there will be some specialized program where keeping the cache manually small you can achieve big improvements, but most mainstream managed languages have very great performance. The slowdown is caused by the frameworks and whatnot, not the language itsel…

I tried counting a large amount of numbers based on a condition in a loop. 70 times difference between python3 and cargo run --release

That’s a tiny as hell microbenchmark though, where rust likely was able to vectorize even. The difference won’t be as drastic for larger (more meaningful) applications.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#317

Post by nthj »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #29
porcoda wrote: post #11

Yup. We have gotten into the habit of leaving a lot of potential performance on the floor in the interest of productivity/accessibility. What always amazes me is when I have to work with a person who only speaks Python or only speaks JS and is completely unaware of the actual performance potential of a system. I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that ta…

> I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that take 1000x (or worse) the time and/or space than it could (even without heroic work). Habit is a very powerful force. Performance is somewhat abstract, as in "just throw more CPUs at it" / it works for me (on my top of the line PC). But people will happily keep on using unergonomic tools just because they've al…

Part of the problem is we use unintentionally vague terms like "performance." What does that mean? Bandwidth? Reliability? Scalability? Something we can fix later right? That's what all executives and—frankly—most engineers hear.

I only ever talk about "latency." Latency is time—you can't get latency back once you've spent it.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#318

Post by vsareto »

porcoda wrote: post #11

Yup. We have gotten into the habit of leaving a lot of potential performance on the floor in the interest of productivity/accessibility. What always amazes me is when I have to work with a person who only speaks Python or only speaks JS and is completely unaware of the actual performance potential of a system. I think a lot of people just accept the performance they get as normal even if they are doing things that ta…

That knowledge is often not required to earn a living, so it's not surprising to me at all. My only realistic advice for people lamenting the common lack of this knowledge is to teach it (so you feel like you're making a difference) or put yourself among people with similar interests. Making performance knowledge a requirement to earn a paycheck these days is going to take a hell of a lot of change.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#319

Post by tcfhgj »

bayindirh wrote: post #113
p1esk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely when 99.9% of the software you use in your daily life is user friendly Python, having to do anything in C/C++ is a complete exercise in frustration, it feels like going back a few decades in time

As a person who uses both languages for various needs, I disagree. Things which takes minutes in optimized C++ will probably take days in Python, even if I use the "accelerated" libraries for matrix operations and other math I implement in C++. Lastly, people think C++ is not user friendly. No, it certainly is. It needs being careful, yes, but a lot of things can be done in less lines then people expect.

C++ isn't user friendly.

Have you ever tried Rust? Compared to C++, it's like lawyer speech vs poetry

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#320

Post by tylerchr »

geysersam wrote: post #189
stonogo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only an excuse if you're sociopathically profit-oriented. The program is developed orders of magnitude fewer times than it is run. Shitty performance, like pollution, is an externality that can be ignored but should not.

Shitty performance certainly is bad, but it is not an externality like emissions into the atmosphere. The fundamental difference is that the customer (and only the customer) is harmed by bad performance, while emissions harms everyone.

I'm not so sure. Emissions don't harm everyone instantly; they affect people disproportionately and only impact everyone over time as the effects accumulate. Sure, maybe bad performance only affects the customer initially, but can't you help but wonder what the cumulative opportunity cost of bad performance on civilization has been?

The predominant perception among nontechnical people is that computers are fundamentally unreliable and slow. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that might be holding up the rate of innovation.

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