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"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

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Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#91

Post by SubjectToChange »

ryandrake wrote: post #15
myself248 wrote: post #2

I'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.

Fully agree. Developers should regularly dog-food their software and they should have to do it on the lowest-spec machine/phone that the software claims to be supported on. Too many developers run their creations on their fully-maxxed-out development workstation beast machine, observe it runs fast enough, and call it a day.

It's a tremendous waste of money for a business to spend expensive developer time waiting on garbage workstations. Simply targeting benchmark/latency metrics is enough.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#92

Post by jcranmer »

richiebful1 wrote: post #23

Is this really true that software is getting slower? I've been using a budget Windows 10 desktop lately, and I'm shocked by how fast everything is running: ESRI ArcGIS, Firefox, code editors, etc. I remember having a budget desktop PC back in the mid 2000's and it was a significantly worse experience on very basic workflows (Excel, regular web browsing, etc)

I tried actually looking for anyone who actually did experiments to confirm whether or not software is getting slower and... uh... I can't really find anyone who has done such an experiment. Possibly, this is just the shittification of search, but everything that turns up is essentially just a link to a thought piece on the bloat of software, which almost invariably degenerates into shitting on Electron.

On anecdotal evidence, one thing I recall from the late 90's/early 00's era of computing is the sheer prevalence of splash screens. If you wanted to open an application up, the first thing it displayed was a splash screen, with a progress bar that would animate to show you that it was doing something. And these splash screens have become far less prevalent in modern software, which at least anecdotally throws some doubt on Wirth's Law.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#93

Post by KptMarchewa »

btbuildem wrote: post #31
playingalong wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the devs who need to ride the Corollas? Or is it the managers and/or the testers?

Have testers not suffered enough?! It's the devs that need the slow machines -- they're in the tightest feedback loop, and directly empowered to optimize performance.

Yes, the slowness of my IDE will surely empower me to optimize... performance of rando enterprise internal website #25628 that I'm currently working on.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#94

Post by myself248 »

SubjectToChange wrote: post #91
ryandrake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. Developers should regularly dog-food their software and they should have to do it on the lowest-spec machine/phone that the software claims to be supported on. Too many developers run their creations on their fully-maxxed-out development workstation beast machine, observe it runs fast enough, and call it a day.

It's a tremendous waste of money for a business to spend expensive developer time waiting on garbage workstations. Simply targeting benchmark/latency metrics is enough.

Precisely, but how well is that working out in practice?

Forcing them to CARE about targeting benchmark/latency metrics is the sticking point. And that requires shoving their face in it for long enough that it becomes unbearable.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#95

Post by torstenvl »

threatofrain wrote: post #53
btbuildem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have testers not suffered enough?! It's the devs that need the slow machines -- they're in the tightest feedback loop, and directly empowered to optimize performance.

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…

Nobody is saying hand-write it in assembly like RollerCoaster Tycoon so you can get decent performance on a 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM.

Tons of software would run faster if it DIDN'T use custom stuff. Don't load a JavaScript framework for form validation if using `required` and `pattern` are enough. Don't write your own sorting algorithm unless it's faster than qsort(). Don't write your own data storage engine if SQLite covers your use case.

Story time: I once wrote a memset() replacement because one compiler kept optimizing out my memset() call and didn't have memset_s(). It slowed my program down a lot. When I looked carefully I saw I was always resetting the whole buffer, even though I was keeping track of how much had been written to it. Fixing that lead to a ~10x speedup (0.1s to process a large word processor document went to 0.01s, occasionally 0.02s).

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#96

Post by myself248 »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #73
myself248 wrote: post #2

I'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.

When performance is a non-issue enough that schedules and features are ALLOWED to be the priority, they will always win.

When performance HURTS so much that they are forced to care about it ABOVE the pressure of features and schedules, then we get somewhere.

Which is why browser emulation doesn't work -- it doesn't inflict enough pain. They wince through it, say "well that was awful, back to rushing more features out the door" and forget about it.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#97

Post by troupo »

SubjectToChange wrote: post #83
ado__dev wrote: post #3

I 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.

I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. Until customers care about performance/optimization, most businesses won't care. Eventually there will come a day where hardware will stagnate sufficiently to incentivize software efficiency.

> Until customers care about performance/optimization

They do, Businesses and programmers are incapable of listening to them

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#98

Post by MichaelZuo »

rahkiin wrote: post #81
metalliqaz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could use some tips on talking with IT about this as it cripples work performance

Maybe it is part of their secret strategy to force in-house developers to develop for the 5th percentile worst case. As the parent alluded to.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#99

Post by MichaelZuo »

torstenvl wrote: post #95
threatofrain wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

Nobody is saying hand-write it in assembly like RollerCoaster Tycoon so you can get decent performance on a 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. Tons of software would run faster if it DIDN'T use custom stuff. Don't load a JavaScript framework for form validation if using `required` and `pattern` are enough. Don't write your own sorting algorithm unless it's faster than qsort(). Don't write your own data storage engine if…

That's an interesting example, probably most software products featured on HN are less complex then Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 in core logic, perhaps not in every aspect.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#100

Post by troupo »

crazygringo wrote: post #43
richiebful1 wrote: post #23

Is this really true that software is getting slower? I've been using a budget Windows 10 desktop lately, and I'm shocked by how fast everything is running: ESRI ArcGIS, Firefox, code editors, etc. I remember having a budget desktop PC back in the mid 2000's and it was a significantly worse experience on very basic workflows (Excel, regular web browsing, etc)

Agreed. Between SSDs, blazing faster home DSL internet, and multicore processors, using a computer is much faster than it's ever been before. Sure there's more software bloat, and webpage bloat, but if anything the overall user experience has gotten faster . And that's even with resource hogs like Retina displays and 4K video. Like, go look up YouTube videos of people using older systems (not VM's). A Mac in 1989 tak…

> Between SSDs, blazing faster home DSL internet, and multicore processors, using a computer is much faster than it's ever been before.

How much faster? Our hardware is several orders of magnitude faster than 20-30 years ago. And yet it takes multiple seconds to start even the simplest app doing nothing, and don't get me started on more complex software

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