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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)

#31

Post by andrewstuart »

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.

Oh my god ripgrep is fast.

I was astounded when I first used ripgrep.

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

#32

Post by IshKebab »

mcculley wrote: post #5
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…

Modern computers have more bandwidth and more latency. They are faster and also feel slower. http://danluu.com/input-lag/

Those results show no clear correlation with age at all. It that low latency was possible in the 80s and it's still possible now. But throughout computer history there have been plenty of terrible high latency devices.

I agree with OP. Generally computers today are much faster than they were in the 90s.

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

#33

Post by dartos »

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.

cries in npm

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

#34

Post by legulere »

Very simple: as computers get faster, the incentives for reducing the need of resources of software decrease. You used to need to optimise, otherwise the software would be unusable or not fit on a floppy disk. You don't need to do that anymore, which is a good thing as it makes software cheaper and faster to write. Software is more cost-efficient because it needs to be less resource-efficient.

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

#35

Post by makingstuffs »

don-code wrote: post #22
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 dr…

Jesus Christ, Encarta, now there’s something which was deeply nested in the cache of my mind

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

#36

Post by dartos »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #28

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 e…

Yeah I mean the computing world, especially on desktop, is more about UX and things _feeling_ good instead of speed.

Imo it’s a fine trade off 90% of the time.

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

#37

Post by ignoramous »

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.”

I mean, these days I summon a super compute cluster for autocomplete in my IDE and chat with another with a 100k context window to pretty print large JSONs.

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

#38

Post by dkga »

don-code wrote: post #22
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 dr…

I share your observations on the evolution of specs and of user experience. But I disagree with the conclusion. My observation is that the more powerful experience today is not proportional to the compute, memory and storage resources we are deploying.

Looking at the bigger picture, just having a lot of OSS nowadays having apps hiding in the background rather than being killed; constant updates and pinging of servers by apps; etc means that we now have a much bigger, bloated footprint.

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

#40

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mrcode007 wrote: post #19
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This gets compounded when applications start fighting for resources on the same machine and you get unanticipated interactions. One strategy for dealing with this is to use something like k8s to run the various components in different pods. That way you can size each pod such that there are always enough resources set aside for that component, and if it starts getting too big for its britches, you know about it bef…

It’s infeasible on the desktop because for each application you now have a management memory overhead where the container subsystem in the operating system eats up memory for book keeping data structures. Now imagine 1000 apps running and having memory eaten up by running 1000 containers on your desktop.

I don't disagree, but I think that container overhead is the smaller part of the problem. It was recently recommended to me that we should just allocate double the max we've ever seen it consume--switch from 99% unutilized to 99.9% unutilized. Better to be conservative than to get paged in the middle of the night.
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