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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."

#101

Post by vikingerik »

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.

And don't forget phones in all of this as well. Mobile developers have the latest and greatest and fastest, but half your users will be on $60 Android pre-paid or entry-level phones that can be a factor of four or more slower than what you've been developing on.

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

#102

Post by londons_explore »

londons_explore wrote: post #39
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.

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.

By the way... For anyone reading this wanting to solve exactly this problem...

This feature is currently part of devtools. But if it could be enabled as part of Chromes policy engine, then IT departments could enable it by default for all developers, managers, and everyone working on the product, specifically for only web URL's of the product itself.

So: If you want to help solve the fact computers are slow for everyone, probably one of the most impactful things you could do is to send a PR to the Chromium project to let the network and CPU slowdown code[1] be possible to activate from the policy code [2].

[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...

[2]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

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

#103

Post by Gigachad »

toast0 wrote: post #32
wanderr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this for developers. I got to experience this first hand because I had a boss who thought like you. Developers generally need to run a bunch of resource intensive tools to build the application in the first place, so an underpowered system will already be choking. It means their app will feel slow no matter what. So then when they run it and it's slow, they will shrug and say it's just slow because their syste…

I think it's reasonable to have a separate machine to do building on. You can include a push to the target in the build script, or use network mounts or something. Remote debugging is a thing, if you need to use a debugger but don't have the resources to debug on the target. But I disagree with your basic assumption that > It means their app will feel slow no matter what. If you can make it feel fast or at least resp…

Once you’ve got Node, docker, Postgres, redis, an IDE, etc running, the system is out of memory and already chugging before your actual app even opens.

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

#104

Post by threatofrain »

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…

> 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.

Most software is made by stitching together off-the-shelf components. I don't think people on the web need a warning about not writing too much custom code. The HN complaint about the web is regarding bloat from people who walk the mainstream road of web development. Loading a bloated framework to do whatever is an example of such mainstream development.

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

#105

Post by Gigachad »

troupo wrote: post #97
SubjectToChange wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Businesses and programmers listen to money. When they don’t, they go out of business.

Users primarily care about features first and speed second.

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

#106

Post by timw4mail »

dijit wrote: post #76
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.

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…

The A750 is not that poor of a GPU either. If that's considered low-end, then gaming on a Steam Deck, or a budget gaming computer is impossible.

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

#107

Post by Gigachad »

pmontra wrote: post #40

Anecdotally this does not apply to my laptop from 2014. It was born with a HDD and upgraded to SSD a couple of years later. It still feels fast enough and, more up to the point, it doesn't feel to get any slower by the years. Actually it's getting faster and that was the feeling I had with my previous laptop from 2006. OK, I've been using Linux on them since January 2009, so no Microsoft software (but Teams is slow,…

Yeah the only bit of software I’d think of as slow is Steam. Everything else is incredibly snappy. My iPhone is several years old now and it never misses a frame. My MacBook M1 is 3 years old and feels brand new still.

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

#108

Post by rightbyte »

Xeamek wrote: post #45
wredue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think it's just about (or even mainly) functional programmers. Look on something like java or kotlin, that are inherently slowing down EVERY.SINGLE.VARRIABLE. access by boxing them into objects. On other hand there is rust, which takes quite a bit of inspiration from fp aproach but obviously still cares about the performance.

Java ints etc are not boxed, right?

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

#109

Post by scruple »

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.

We have minimum specifications we meet for our software (games) and a suite of old desktops (that I occasionally have to go kick) that run CI performance tests for us. It's not much investment, outside of the initial setup and generating test cases / automation, but it's been worth it for us. It's helped us find a lot of problems over the years.

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

#110

Post by crazygringo »

troupo wrote: post #100
crazygringo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> And yet it takes multiple seconds to start even the simplest app doing nothing

This is what I don't get when people say. On my MacBook, I just launched TextEdit. The entire "launch" time is basically taken up by a window zoom effect that is maybe half a second.

I just put chrome://restart into my browser bar, and Chrome quit and fully relaunched in about three quarters of a second. (And then obviously it takes more time to load the tab contents.)

Double-clicking on a multi-page, 2 MB PDF takes about two-thirds of a second to open Preview and render.

As far as I'm concerned, everything's lightning fast. There's absolute no "taking multiple seconds", whether it's a simple text editor or an entire web browser.

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