"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away"
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
71–80 of 193 posts
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#72I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
Is there some way to reliably simulate this, e.g. using a VM? It would be nice to have IDE, build tools etc. using all available speed while running the output as if it was on slower hardware.
Dev Containers are cool. There’s a VSCode extension.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#73I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
> As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
That's BS. Like there was no such things as featuritis and unreasonable schedules.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optimizing performance is very nontrivial and often means writing custom stuff, which will deeply affect TCO. It’s fine for devs to sympathize with users, but in the most ultimate perspective the users are actual or potential customers of the business and not your clients. In other words, the business should have ultimate authority and responsibility to structure incentives and pursue priorities. Up until the enginee…
In enterprise software, optimizing performance usually means removing the custom stuff.
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Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#75Yes but bandwidth is getting faster more rapidly than software is becoming slower.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#76I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
I work in video games. My Lead QA recently accosted me regarding the low-spec machine being unusable. (it's an 11th Gen i5, 16GiB Ram and an Intel ARC A750).
He wanted me to get a better machine.
I politely declined indicating that this is the low spec machine, he made a fuss and I said if we can't make it run on that then we should stop making video games.
For context: The weak part for us was the CPU; the ARC A750 is a pretty poor GFX card but it should never be unplayable, it's around RTX 2060-2070 in speed, not unreasonable for a low spec machine.
It's very easy just to say yes to creeping performance demands, even in video games that are historically highly optimised. (obvious caveat here: sometimes things are not well optimised and hugely neglected)
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#77I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
In some big business companies this is solved by pre-installed "security software" that usually takes up about half of the RAM, sometimes even more, and is using a measurable chunk of CPU all the time.
I totally feel this comment, myself being a corporate drone that has to deal with this software.
Between disk encryption, anti virus, IT asset management, data custody tracking, etc; my PC is as slow as molasses.
Unfortunately I think its slow in a different way that low-spec machines are slow. Mine is very slow on IO ops, but I have 32GB of RAM and a 20-core i7, so plenty of resources available even after all the BS.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#78I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly. On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.
It’s actually worse than you think. Functional programmers have been in a massive propaganda campaign to actively paint optimization not just as “usually not necessary”, but actually as a negative thing. Ask any developer what they think of optimization, and the vast majority will respond “optimization is the root of all evil” or some other nonsense variant. Now that they’ve successfully paint optimization as bad, th…
Functional programmers have been in a massive propaganda campaign to actively paint optimization not just as “usually not necessary”, but actually as a negative thing.
Based on what? FP advocates like performance as much as anyone else.
They need this because the performance characteristics of pure functional programming is pretty dogshit.
Research languages like ATS show that functional programming doesn't come at the price of performance.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#79I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
Ideally they have a fast machine to run compilers and shit on , but then the actual product they are developing runs on a slow machine. Luckily, Chrome has a feature to deliberately throttle the CPU and network speed for precisely this reason. Sadly hardly anyone uses it.
> Sadly hardly anyone uses it.
It would be great if Chrome's Developers would use something similar to run Chrome itself.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#80I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly. On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.
It’s actually worse than you think. Functional programmers have been in a massive propaganda campaign to actively paint optimization not just as “usually not necessary”, but actually as a negative thing. Ask any developer what they think of optimization, and the vast majority will respond “optimization is the root of all evil” or some other nonsense variant. Now that they’ve successfully paint optimization as bad, th…
I'm puzzled by this read on the situation. For starters, vanishingly few programmers work in a pure functional context. Secondly, performance characteristics of functional programming are absolutely not dogshit. There are specific languages/VMs/etc that have inherent performance issues, but that's not a universal truth. To claim that would be like pointing at Ruby and saying that imperative programming is slow.
I think maybe a more measured take is that many modern environments remove the developer sufficiently from the actual execution of their code that performance optimization becomes much less obvious and straightforward.
Also, and this is just my personal experience, but I've basically never heard anyone actually claim that optimization is bad or unnecessary. I have never, ever heard anyone claim that profiling tools are bad.
What I have repeatedly heard is that there often isn't a compelling business case for performance optimization. Unfortunately that's probably correct a lot of the time.
I really think you're pointing at the wrong folks here. The hordes of JS devs out there who are deprioritizing perf aren't doing so because they think it's fundamentally a bad thing to optimize, that's just a self-apparently ridiculous notion, they are doing so because they work in a culture that values delivery of features massively more than optimization.