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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

#121

Post by dalmo3 »

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…

> I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. (...) companies are using JS-based apps not because it necessarily leads to a better user experience but because it reduces their costs.

That's quite literally the market having a say.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#122

Post by szpght »

sbthrowaway wrote: post #108
didgetmaster wrote: post #11

A big part of the problem in my opinion, is that people are generally not interested in investing (money, time, effort) in technology. They focus almost exclusively on products. The short term is always given a much higher priority than long term. If someone invents a much better way (faster, easier, cheaper) to do some key part of a widely used product (operating system, database, file system, network protocol), the…

> You can't just find a way to do something 10x faster and expect others to flock to it. I have learned this the hard way. People are generally loss averse and resistant to change so making things better is often an uphill struggle. As an example, I have worked on improving a build tool that is notoriously loathed in part for its poor performance. Part of the problem was that it was a jvm based tool and the jvm has t…

How about starting jvms in advance?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#123

Post by blauditore »

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…

I think part of the reason for this myth is that if you run old software on a modern computer, it's blazingly fast. That doesn't mean it was fast back in the day too.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#124

Post by somebody78978 »

xyzelement wrote: post #111

The author says that he's not a product manager and doesn't have a particular insight. As a PM, I can share how I think: The main question is "does it matter?" The answer depends case by case. For example, if I am the PM for TurboTax Premier desktop software, I know that it's latent - but it probably doesn't matter in a way that deserves prioritization. Sure, my clients would like for the forms to load faster, but th…

Regarding TurboTax, I'm pretty sure the clients want the software to work slower; there are times when the software just pauses and says something like "Checking over to make sure we found all deductions", even though obviously all of that work has already been done.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#125

Post by deltarholamda »

crazygringo wrote: post #44
j_leboulanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a s…

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.…

Bootup taking 20 seconds is consistent with my memory as well. It's a bit of a stretch to say that's "a few seconds," but it's not wildly off. 20 seconds is pretty fast, especially considering the anemic HDD speeds of the time.

I used an SE/30 well into the late 90s as a kind of boutique writing appliance. I never used Word, I used BBEdit, which opened rather quickly. I always felt getting the machine up and going was faster than a standard Windows desktop.

The SE/30 was a hell of a machine. I set up an SE for a friend in the mid-90s for her to write papers on, and she really liked using it and never complained about the speed (and she did use Word). Which is saying something, because the SE was kind of a dog.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#126

Post by ajmurmann »

runevault wrote: post #102
ajmurmann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

I dunno, I run into a lot of devs on reddit/here/etc that argue "who cares about performance just spin up more containers! I just wanna write {insert slow interpreted language here}."

The slowness of interpreted languages is frequently not the main culprit for slow performance though. Most load times in web apps I've worked on usually were spent doing inefficient or unnecessary DB queries or API requests.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#127

Post by briantakita »

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.

Some projects have performance as it's core proposition. Notably Solidjs, Astrojs, Qwikjs, among many others.

React has dominated the front end for years now & brought some great innovations, but it's dominance is waning.

> performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days

Many devs seek to optimize for career prospects. Since the majority of FE jobs center around React, these devs focus on React. As companies prioritize FE performance, the jobs related to performance follow & the mass of FE developers follow after that.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#128

Post by xyzelement »

somebody78978 wrote: post #124
xyzelement wrote: post #111

The author says that he's not a product manager and doesn't have a particular insight. As a PM, I can share how I think: The main question is "does it matter?" The answer depends case by case. For example, if I am the PM for TurboTax Premier desktop software, I know that it's latent - but it probably doesn't matter in a way that deserves prioritization. Sure, my clients would like for the forms to load faster, but th…

Regarding TurboTax, I'm pretty sure the clients want the software to work slower ; there are times when the software just pauses and says something like "Checking over to make sure we found all deductions", even though obviously all of that work has already been done.

I was actually thinking about that case - does the slowness "suggest" that the software is really thinking deeply and working hard for me. I do think you have a good point.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#129

Post by josephcsible »

8note wrote: post #110
josephcsible wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On today's hardware, or on hardware of the time? Things like word used to be much better in speed of the interface - it used to take fewer clicks to do stuff

On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#130

Post by [deleted] »

blauditore wrote: post #123
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…

I think part of the reason for this myth is that if you run old software on a modern computer, it's blazingly fast. That doesn't mean it was fast back in the day too.

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