Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techslang.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 193 posts

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

#111

Post by crazygringo »

Xeamek wrote: post #65
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…

Counter argument - HN post from 6 months ago: "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933

But here's a counterpoint from within that same thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447704

There's also the note that this person was running NT on a later system far, far faster than it was designed for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447461

When we're trying to reproduce what older systems were like, it's important not to be combining software from earlier era on hardware from a later one.

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

#112

Post by Gigachad »

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

I just clicked around on some apps on my iPhone 13 that I haven’t used in ages and they all opened in under 1 second. It looks like they basically open instantly but some make a network request to load the first page.

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

#113

Post by AA-BA-94-2A-56 »

myself248 wrote: post #94
SubjectToChange wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a web developer, it’s less about me caring and more about my boss caring.

If anything, give the C-suites the shitbox laptops.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

threatofrain wrote: post #104
torstenvl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by nebula8804 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #98
rahkiin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No its a mentality that has been in corporate for decades. The best way for IT to not get in trouble is to lock everything down and define strict policies that prevent any ambiguity and define peoples work requirements in strict categories. This used to be easier with the advent of timeshared terminals but the advent of desktop computing caught them off guard. Now they have done their best to seize back control so much so that it strangles companies to death(as faster moving startups don't have this problem and innovation at the big companies stall)

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

#116

Post by emchammer »

My Nokia 2780 4G flip phone running KaiOS takes 8-9 seconds from pressing the send key to visibly sorting the recent calls list. My ex said that it was probably programmed in Java. Everything else is slow, including dialing digits from the home screen, and I always end up misdialing or something. My 2G Nokia 5160 and 8890 had instantaneous UIs 20-25 years ago, and those had ARM7TDMI CPUs. What if I need to call 911?

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

#117

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

alkonaut wrote: post #48
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 use a reasonably beefy machine to develop “heavy” desktop software. It’s definitely the kind discussed in this article. I find it frustrating that it has noticeable input lag even with moderate workloads for exactly the reasons mentioned. But then you talk to end users and it turns out they work 80 hours on one big document with input lag of several seconds. Some actions can take 15 seconds. It’s mad. It’s larger t…

And this is exactly why you talk to users. You get the most unexpected feedback that you'd never have guessed in a million years.

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

#118

Post by toast0 »

Gigachad wrote: post #103
toast0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Run all that stuff on a different machine than you run the app on. Unless the app includes all that stuff.

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

#119

Post by Zambyte »

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)

Do you think running Windows 10 on the PC from the mid 2000s would be a better or worse experience than running the software that ran om that machine at the time?

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

#120

Post by troupo »

crazygringo wrote: post #110
troupo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Macs are now crazy fast due to insane advances in their CPU. On intel macs you could definitely feel the slowdown of all software.

I mean, they advertised "instant wake up from sleep" as a feature... That Macs had in 2008.

I have a Windows machine that starts from NVMe. It takes a full minute for it to start a handful of startup apps, also in NVme: Firefox, Steam, 1password. What is it doing?

Post reply on HN