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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#91

Post by ajmurmann »

trollied wrote: post #5

I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.

IMO it's unfair to blame the developers. Almost every developer I know loves working on performance stories. It's one of the few times we get to use our deeper technical and algorithmic skills and get a clear metric to optimize for. However, businesses are reluctant to prioritize that work and get impatient when they don't see new "features". I worked on a project where PMs would constantly complain to me about a particular admin page being slow. I wrote a ticket for them that would implement some optimizations (simple pagination and SQL optimizations) and asked them to prioritize it. They had time to complain every chance they got, but the ticket never got prioritized. I eventually got so sick of the complaining that I just took a Saturday morning and did it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#92

Post by jaclaz »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

Only as a corollary, to put things in perspective, in the early '90's that was Windows 3.x on a 33-66-100 Mhz CPU with 4, maybe 8 MB (yes megabytes) of RAM and programs had a splash screen to mask the fact that they were very slow loading.

With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#93

Post by anthk »

bob1029 wrote: post #47
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth All you need to do to prove to yourself how bad things have gotten is to find an old PC (or VM) and load up a copy of Windows XP. The amount of bullshit between mouse click & updated photons arriving back at your eyeballs is insane in 2023. Software used to be much faster than me. Now, it is significantly slower. The only things that are r…

Days ago I ran W2k, something I missed between Windows 98 and Windows XP, just for fun, under a VM, with no Direct3D hardware acceleration, just KVM accelerated virt-manager. The virtual machine ran faster than the GL accelerated Mate DE in the host.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#94

Post by count »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #68
agentultra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing so…

> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was br…

Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#95

Post by anthk »

nirvdrum wrote: post #51
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. I don't use Slack because I want to. I use it because I must. When we had open protocols, you really could choose the best client. Nowadays everything is a walled garden. It's amazing just how poorly we've managed…

Kopete did the same Slack does today (with inline Youtube videos and LaTeX equations) with KDE3 running in the background under a machine with 256MB of RAM.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#96

Post by another_kel »

citrin_ru wrote: post #35
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware…

> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often).

Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms.

People whine about bloated web tech in app, and how good it was with native while forgetting that availability and feature parity on all platforms is a feature too.

I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#97

Post by ajmurmann »

commandlinefan wrote: post #56
luckylion wrote: post #2

> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped cari…

> at least for websites We could start by stopping using these stupid pointless frameworks that provide little functionality but reams of overhead.

How much of it is frameworks like React vs boatloads of trackers and other ad-related stuff?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#98

Post by agloe_dreams »

ehnto wrote: post #57
amalcon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

My IDE auto-saves as you make changes, yet I still mash ctrl+s frequently. I think it's mostly games that gave me the habit though. PC gaming has always been a gauntlet.

> My IDE auto-saves as you make changes

This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#99

Post by anthk »

torstenvl wrote: post #81
ramesh31 wrote: post #53

People care about features. They don't care if a page takes 2 seconds to load or has a thousand npm packages holding it up. They care that they can click a button and it does the thing that they need to do to accomplish their task. This stuff is all magic and pixie dust to 99.9% of people. And if adding the new feature creates bloat and slowness, so be it. If this tiny little seemingly insignificant thing that user w…

Microsoft had to force people off XP and then again off Windows 7. Firefox ate Netscape's (edit: Mozilla Suite's) lunch. Oracle eventually had to buy MySQL to stop the bleeding (and try to upsell). So no. While people do prefer a 100% solution over a 90% solution, they much more strongly prefer a 90% solution now over a 100% solution that keeps them at work an extra hour or two nearly every day.

Netscape -> IE 6 dominates Netscape-> Mozilla Suite -> Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#100

Post by josephcsible »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras.

Install Windows 2000 and Office 97 in a VM. Word will be blazingly fast compared to the latest version. What features do you ever use in the latest version of Word that weren't present back then?

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