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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

#181

Post by zabzonk »

JohnFen wrote: post #173
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?

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.

what is it, how many seats, why not maintain it yourself if it is so useful? i can't believe that there is no closed source doing the same thing

FOSS means free, depending on what you want from the software - if you want more than the FOSS offering does, you may have to pay for improvements, or you may not.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#182

Post by JohnFen »

0xb0565e487 wrote: post #42
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.

As a "one of these day devs" I only care about performance when it starts becoming a problem and I see nothing wrong with the way I'm going about this.

Are you certain that you can adequately judge when the lack of performance is starting to become a problem for people who aren't you?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#183

Post by funcDropShadow »

gilbetron wrote: post #143
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.

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!

> intuitive, reactive interfaces

Really? Do you think modern user interfaces are great? Everybody implements their widgets from scratch using html, css and Javascript. The boring old ui toolkits standardized a lot of features that are today non existent or different everywhere. For example a plain old list widget where you could select multiple items had standard ways to select ranges, to add ranges to a selection, to toggle the selection of single items, to select all of them. Most modern software doesn't have those actions. And even if it has some of them you have to find out how. Whereas such things used to be commonplace. Regularity of boring features is actually intuitive. Nice looking is not intuitive.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#184

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

Newer software in most cases has more features but do we all really need all this features? All features I use in the newest MS Office where already present in Office 2000. Sure there are people who use features added recently, but if only a small fraction users uses a feature it can be implemented in a plugin (given an architecture which allows independent extensions). This way all these new feature would not increase startup time and would not send OS to swapping if you don't have enough RAM.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#185

Post by JohnFen »

zabzonk wrote: post #181
JohnFen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what is it, how many seats, why not maintain it yourself if it is so useful? i can't believe that there is no closed source doing the same thing FOSS means free, depending on what you want from the software - if you want more than the FOSS offering does, you may have to pay for improvements, or you may not.

All good questions, asked by all the devs here. I'm not about to defend the use of this particular product. I was just pointing to an example of FOSS that not only isn't free, it's very expensive.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#186

Post by TeMPOraL »

adamckay wrote: post #144
xyzelement wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The third example (locksmiths) I get, they're making a little show to avoid a difficult conversation with some customers[0]. A bit scummy, but then again, plenty of customers are no saints themselves. However, the first two examples feel like self-fulfilling prophesies to me.

Normal people have no reference point to judge how fast or slow software and hardware should be, other than through direct experience. By adding fake delays to avoid being honest and perhaps reassuring occasional surprised users, vendors just screw with the mental frameworks people build, at scale. It's a wasted opportunity, too, because if you're brave enough to be honest about execution time and weather the initial wave of distrust, then you may become a new reference point for your users, who will now view your competitors' software as bloated.

--

[0] - Though recently I brought this story up with a locksmith, and he said he thinks it's just stupid and there are hardly any situations in which it would even make sense.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#187

Post by inglor_cz »

amalcon wrote: post #15
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…

> 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.

I wrote my first program in 1994 in Turbo Pascal.

Yes, you're right, Ctrl-S is so deeply embedded in my subconsciousness that I will be probably pressing those keys on my deathbed.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#188

Post by gavinhoward »

zabzonk wrote: post #172
gavinhoward wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The world is changed by unreasonable people with dreams.

So yes, I will. Thank you.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#189

Post by zabzonk »

JohnFen wrote: post #185
zabzonk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is it, how many seats, why not maintain it yourself if it is so useful? i can't believe that there is no closed source doing the same thing FOSS means free, depending on what you want from the software - if you want more than the FOSS offering does, you may have to pay for improvements, or you may not.

All good questions, asked by all the devs here. I'm not about to defend the use of this particular product. I was just pointing to an example of FOSS that not only isn't free, it's very expensive.

sorry, but i really can't believe this. to start with how can foss manage a per seat license? i get needing support, but if you have the code (which you must else it is not foss) why can't you strip out the per seat code (which is a no-no in my experience on closed code) and just pay a one-off/per problem support contract?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#190

Post by Narishma »

M95D wrote: post #71
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 remember using Corel 8 on a 486 with 8MB of memory. I would write the text in notepad and paste it into Corel, otherwise it would take 2s for each letter to appear. I still find it amaizing that it worked. A 486 is something like half the speed of a single core ESP32 today...

CorelDRAW 8 came out in 1998. That it even runs on a 486 is a miracle.
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