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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)

#51

Post by _a_a_a_ »

Let me take a tangent to this, a couple of decades ago I was using Delphi and it was marvellous. A couple of years ago I tried to do some equivalent front-end building backed by a database, in Visual Studio and it was a bloody nightmare. Complexity beyond my understanding, little or no documentation, the automatically generated code was broken... It cost me several days and then I gave up.

So anyone saying that modern software is slower because it does more, better - well then I give you Visual Studio as proof that's not always true.

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

#52

Post by WJW »

andrewstuart wrote: post #31
WJW wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure. The first time I used it I doubted I had used it correctly because I could not believe it had actually grepped through all the ~34k files in my Rails app in under 30 ms.

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

#53

Post by distract8901 »

legulere wrote: post #34

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.

I recently made a WPF GUI tool. It's very simple, just a dozen controls total. It's all default textboxes, buttons, and flat colors, not even any images.

It weighs EIGHTY MEGABYTES, I have to ship a dozen files AND it still requires .net installed on the client machine.

However, my main job is embedded firmware. Honestly, I prefer working with such constrained systems. Kilobytes of flash and RAM, CPU so slow I have to actually consider what it does with each cycle. It's so much more fun than working with desktop software.

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

#54

Post by wildredkraut »

Well, another thing is, that old UI’s used to have no heavy animations, that feels slow because the users actions are not instantly triggered. You clicked on something and BAM it was there, without any complex animations. Frustrating animations came to later Windows Versions. Iirc there was switch offable minimize and maximize animations, that all.

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

#55

Post by sombragris »

I concur there's obvious bloat and unnecessary cruft but also:

- Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859.

- As others have said, code is 64-bit now, which multiplies the space and memory which used to be required by 32- or 16-bit apps.

- The relentless, unyelding and unforgiving pressure to produce results quickly under insane constraints discourages or forbids any kind of optimization. Now you just put your interpreted code with an Electron platform and call it an app.

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

#56

Post by sombragris »

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…

RE: your point about resolutions, you are correct. And also one should add to this: higher color density. We had 16 or 256 colors. Now we have 24 or 32-bit colors which triples or quadruples the amount of memory required to specify any pixel color.

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

#57

Post by gochi »

wildredkraut wrote: post #54

Well, another thing is, that old UI’s used to have no heavy animations, that feels slow because the users actions are not instantly triggered. You clicked on something and BAM it was there, without any complex animations. Frustrating animations came to later Windows Versions. Iirc there was switch offable minimize and maximize animations, that all.

This has very little to do with animations, as most OS use of complex animations tends to be handled very effectively (ie mission control on Mac or the task view on Windows 11). They do all of that while also handling complex translucency effects and not breaking a sweat, even on $500 hardware.

When you are launching a program and it doesn't do something immediately, this has far more to do with networking, external layers like antiviruses pre-scanning, infected device, or app(s) hogging available resources.

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

#58

Post by charcircuit »

sombragris wrote: post #55

I concur there's obvious bloat and unnecessary cruft but also: - Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859. - As others have said, code is 64-bit now, which multiplies the space and memory which used to be required by 32- or 16-bit apps. - The relentless, unyelding and unforgiving pressure to produce results quickly under insane constra…

>Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859.

No? Are you thinking of UTI-16?

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

#60

Post by demetrius »

charcircuit wrote: post #58
sombragris wrote: post #55

I concur there's obvious bloat and unnecessary cruft but also: - Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859. - As others have said, code is 64-bit now, which multiplies the space and memory which used to be required by 32- or 16-bit apps. - The relentless, unyelding and unforgiving pressure to produce results quickly under insane constra…

>Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859. No? Are you thinking of UTI-16?

> No?

Or maybe author's native language is not English. :D UTF-8 does require twice as much bytes for Cyrillic, for example.

Besides, there's a lot of other operations that happen in modern OS that makes text editing more expensive. E.g. modern applications need to account for bidirectional text, so things like "determining the correspondence between a character on screen and in memory" suddenly require table lookups to determine if the character is RTL or LTR.

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