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Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

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Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#21

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zdragnar wrote: post #13
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

Reduce your screen resolution to 640x480 and most software will feel a whole lot snappier, I bet. Pushing all those extra pixels to a 4k monitor adds a lot of overhead.

Not at all, I went from 1080p to 4k and back, and there is no effect:

teams still takes the same amount of time to load.

It takes me 25 minutes to scroll back 3 years in large chat in what’s app desktop client

It takes me like 2 minutes to scroll back same amount in telegram desktop client

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#22

Post by don-code »

andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port.

This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows.

If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that.

If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive.

Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up.

I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#24

Post by jabradoodle »

khqc wrote: post #7
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

Probably because old software (e.g. emacs) feels a lot faster than new software (e.g. vscode) on the same hardware, that and nostalgia

Honestly vscode is quite snappy and I often seem to run into issues with Emacs performance.

For a long time printing a largeish string to a buffer would crash Emacs, and it still lags vscode in opening large files in my experience.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#25

Post by rapnie »

andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

They were slow, yet now they should be fast theoretically, not in practice though.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#26

Post by ojbyrne »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #8

A quote from Henry Petroski that has stuck with me: “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#27

Post by api »

TheMode wrote: post #20

Because we write extensible instead of composable software. We do not distribute functions, but apps. How many instructions do you need in assembly to compute `1+1`? How many instructions do you need to open your search bar, get the calculator and do the calculation? We also make software responsible for way too much. Cross-platform is a joke. How can we expect developers to consider every platform? Obviously they wi…

It seems like sometime around the late 2000s we literally gave up on the idea of composability as a profession.

I think economics has a lot to do with it. People buy apps and services, not functions and components. All the money is at the tail end of the development process when something becomes product, and that involves a lot of things that are at odds with composability.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#28

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Graphics.

Everything else is a pittance and mostly the wrong answer. When people say "browsers" they're also wrong, because a more accurate answer is "browser compositors."

The backing layers for windows currently open on your operating system are orders of magnitude larger in size than entire operating systems, multiple times, actively running in memory by comparison.

So, I think that's the real answer. Everything else seems like a pittance until you're doing some desktop computing or web browsing that requires large data structures.

The two largest and most compute expensive processes running on the system you're using to read this post are probably your OS's window server, and the browser to read HN, and that's because your browser is largely also managing its own compositing system.

That's why.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#29

Post by mrcode007 »

realo wrote: post #15
mrcode007 wrote: post #2

Few factors influence this. One is increased screen resolutions. 640x480 display requires about 1.2MB of memory to hold all pixels. a 3840 x 2160 display requires 33MB of pixel data. That’s a ~28x increase. This also means that app assets like icons have increased in size and we use more of them because of larger screens we can fit more of them on the screen. Next the storage size increased. Therefore we tend to keep…

Trusting 100,000 packages ? Shudders.

I know. Yet most folks take packages at face value as if it was a part of some standard library.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#30

Post by jabradoodle »

WJW wrote: post #17
sgloutnikov wrote: post #8

A quote from Henry Petroski that has stuck with me: “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

Petroski was completely wrong about this. It is just that all of the gains from hardware have gone to enabling additional features rather than making the same feature set faster. Things like ripgrep make it more than obvious how fast simple software could be on modern hardware, but incentives are what they are and for most of the apps out there more features will be more profitable than more speed.

While there is an element of truth to that we have sacrificed performance for ease of development, especially in cross platform use cases.

(Often a reasonable trade off, imho)

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