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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

#141

Post by b112 »

bob1029 wrote: post #115
agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system. Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regu…

You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this.

So many miss this, and the big boys don't only miss the forest for the trees, they can't see the leaves either.

Total, narrow, limited scope.

Then big boys win by Hulk Smash. Startups win by leaves and forest.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#142

Post by s17n »

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…

He's running 20 year old software on today's hardware, of course it's going to be fast.

The idea that software is slower now is nonsense, if anything it's faster in general. It's using orders of magnitude more hardware, of course, but how is that a problem?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#143

Post by gilbetron »

jaclaz wrote: post #92
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.

I dunno, we have ridiculously amazing displays, live video, amazing audio, intuitive, reactive interfaces, and profound knowledge at our fingertips. Seems like we're doing pretty good!

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#144

Post by adamckay »

xyzelement wrote: post #128
somebody78978 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does indeed. Here's an article that discusses it more [1]. I know of a few thins that introduce an artificial wait with a progress bar to make the user feel like it's doing something complex.

There's also situations in the real world too, coin counting machines apparently also delay showing the results because people won't believe that dumping a jar full of coins into a machine and having an instant answer can be accurate.

People also do it too, locksmiths may umm and ah when called out to pick a lock because if they do it too quickly customers can feel aggrieved at a large invoice or even feel less safe in their homes if they've seen their front door picked in 10 seconds.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-s...

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#145

Post by xupybd »

>This doesn’t quite agree with my personal experience. I pay a lot of attention to people using computers in my daily life: clerks, receptionists, administrators, etc. And they’re pretty universally frustrated with how slow and unreliable their computers are. They’ll complain for hours if you give them the chance.

These are not the people buying these systems. It's someone much further up the chain. They often don't care if the software is a dog to use. Unless that means they need to employ more people.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#146

Post by gilbetron »

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…

Having spent years and years with visual studio, I can guarantee it didn't function like that on the computers of the time with the typical software/driver load. He's running that on a VM that is vastly faster than what you could get at the time.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#147

Post by NegativeK »

branweb wrote: post #118
jaclaz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.

I'll concede that we're not going supersonic, but our speed is maybe more at 100mph than slower. Computers (including phones, accomplishing the same tasks that desktops were) are absolutely faster than they were.

We also have better UX, more functionality, and better quality.

If people want to run the software of the mid-90s on modern hardware, I'm sure they can figure out a way. The upside is that when it crashes or you have to switch back and forth with modern software with greater functionality, the underlying system will let you do that very quickly.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#148

Post by gavinhoward »

I agree with the author that we can make local changes, and I think we should.

However, I disagree with the author on global changes. I think we can do them. In fact, I think local changes can grow to global ones, or close to it.

Here's my personal plan: like many of you, I want to make money off of my FOSS projects. However, instead of going the donation route, I'm taking an entirely different tack. I am setting myself up as a professional. This includes accepting some liability for my software.

You can bet that if I'm accepting liability, I will be testing my software until it screams.

But the flip side of being professional means crafting software that is fast, and I'm going to do that too. Yes, I'll be expensive, but that software should be a massive lever as a result.

The bigger the lever, the more likely that that software will help my clients out-compete their competitors. Helping them do so is my goal because if they do, their competitors will have to start caring about performance.

And once people care about performance in one thing, it starts to disgust them to have to use slow software in other things. So it may be slow (over decades), but I'm hoping that my work will help performance go viral.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#149

Post by fleddr »

RedShift1 wrote: post #139
nicbou wrote: post #133

Seconds matter an awful lot to me. If things don't happen fast enough, I end up alt-tabbing to the browser, losing my train of thought, and perhaps wasting a few minutes browsing the web. I also work semi-offline a lot. My current internet connection is roughly 100 KBps. The connection in the underground isn't much better. I also work in airports and hotels. These pages that take 10+ seconds to load end up being aban…

Would you wait for 15 to 20 seconds for an SPA to load, if it's guaranteed to work faster during usage, or have it load in 1 second but be slower while using it?

This implies that the typical SPA, once loaded, is just "there" and can be used rapidly as if it's some offline app. In reality, many of them make a huge amount of fresh network calls on each navigation.

Still, it's an interesting question from the user's perspective. Reminds me of the downside of lazily-loaded images on the web. Whilst designed to help people with data constraints, it can have surprising side effects. The anecdote that comes to mind was a rural town in India where inhabitants would visit a particular place for internet access. They'd open a few URLs and just let it download, could take some 20 mins. Next, they'd return to their home to actually look at the pages they downloaded.

This usage pattern doesn't work with lazily loaded images, it forces them to scroll and wait beginning to end on every single URL.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#150

Post by ckolkey »

agloe_dreams wrote: post #98
ehnto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, really? I've got vim set up to auto-save the buffer every time I leave insert mode. It's phenomenal. I literally never need to think about saving.

I guess more analogous to your "save" mechanism would be my git commit.

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