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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

#171

Post by TeMPOraL »

another_kel wrote: post #96
citrin_ru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bloate…

> 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.

Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects is something nobody asks for in a Todo app, and of course, portability gets much easier when you have much less code to port.

Still, I could imagine apps back then having all those online and multiplayer features[0]. But even then, this doesn't add up to modern bloat. APIs, collaborative editing, sync, integrations - these aren't compute-heavy or real-time features, they shouldn't cause a big performance impact. That is, unless you're doing something stupid, like blocking on network requests, keeping state on a server, or just constantly parsing and serializing JSON (or XML).

> Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

Yes. WinAMP reigns supreme. Spotify app is hot, bloated garbage and has only a small fraction of features WinAMP offered. The entire value of Spotify is in their service part - but music streaming existed in 2000. You probably could make WinAMP stream from Spotify if you tried hard enough. I hope someone does and uses this to demonstrate what should be obvious: there's no technial justification for Spotify being so heavy, so feature-less and so bad UI/UX-wise.

--

[0] - They didn't have them, because most of those features only became useful once smartphones and mobile connectivity took off in the earnest.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#172

Post by zabzonk »

gavinhoward wrote: post #167
zabzonk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what on earth do you mean by "professional"? and how can your software be "expensive" if it is also FOSS? or is this satire?

Normal_gaussian got it right. The support and liability contract would be the expensive part, not the FOSS. Notice that I said that I will be expensive, not the FOSS. I meant that my services will be expensive.

unless you are very, very lucky - dream on

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#173

Post by JohnFen »

zabzonk wrote: post #161
gavinhoward wrote: post #148

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 mys…

what on earth do you mean by "professional"? and how can your software be "expensive" if it is also FOSS? or is this satire?

FOSS in no way means "free of cost". We use a piece of FOSS software where I work, and it costs 4 figures per seat.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#174

Post by hinkley »

jedberg wrote: post #69

People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior. Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation. At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected. And I've he…

These features always matter, but they matter the most when you have competition. When the other guys’ retention problems become your selling point, you are making money off of them.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#175

Post by zabzonk »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #165
zabzonk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what on earth do you mean by "professional"? and how can your software be "expensive" if it is also FOSS? or is this satire?

You open source it, but offer a commercial license with warranty and support contract. Many organisations require support contracts, so won't use the free version even if they are internally capable.

yes, i know that but unless in the unlikely event that this guy's FOSS software meets their requirements, they will not do that.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#176

Post by JohnFen »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #113
jedberg wrote: post #69

People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior. Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation. At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected. And I've he…

What's the difference between caring and affecting behavior? If people cancel their subscriptions after a major outage, wouldn't it be reasonable to interpret that some of them cared about performance and reliability? I know I care. If I pay for something and it sucks, I stop paying for it because it's not up to my expectations.

I think people do care about these things, but they don't always know what it is, precisely, they're caring about. They just know that the thing they have is disappointing.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#177

Post by JohnFen »

mjburgess wrote: post #41
iinnPP wrote: post #24

At my previous job I was given permission to fully rewrite the call centre script/tooling used by sales agents. I also came from that team, and took a quick detour to the data team before finally landing in a development role. Giving me a full understanding of not only the agents needs and wants, but the limits on data being fed into this system. The resulting page loaded 10 times faster than what it replaced, which…

It feels like we need a youtube channel dedicated to 30min case studies of this. MS spent x months to build y, here it is in 3 days. etc. etc. People do not realise how fast development and software can be if you design with those priorities. It's orders of magnitude.

Also, many companies and people seem to have forgotten (or never learned) that small teams outperform large ones. There is a point past which every additional person will make the project take longer, and result in lower quality.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#178

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones

My experience is the opposite of this. It's usually the self-taught devs that care a lot about performance, and the formally educated ones who are willing to trade it away.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#179

Post by kitsunesoba »

prmph wrote: post #36
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…

Really disagree on this one. It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from…

It depends on the software in question, but yeah, a lot of it actually was faster even on era-appropriate hardware.

An example that stands out in my mind is Photoshop 7, CS1, and maybe (memory is a little blurry) CS2. It felt considerably more responsive running on a thermally-non-ideal iMac with a single core PowerPC G5 and spinning rust hard disk than PS CC does today on a well cooled M-series MBP or custom built Ryzen 5950X tower with a 7000MB/s PCI-E 4.0 SSD.

That's just ridiculous. Yes, Photoshop has taken on some functionality since then but there is no excuse for anything to feel laggardly on such powerful hardware when it ran great on comparatively pedestrian machines 15 years ago.

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