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…
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
181–190 of 193 posts
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is all the bottom tier machines also have all this crap installed
This is very valid point, as developers using old machines will probably remove all "goodies" provided by manufacturer and have pretty decently running device.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if it doesn't ? FProt is long gone. Now we have McAffee.
If it only takes an hour of work to bypass it, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Anti-virus in practice is more about protecting about broad-spectrum attacks which aren't targeted against anyone in particular. Drive-by trojans, ransomware, and the like. An attacker like that is not going to spend an hour per target. A more motivated, targeted attacker is going to be a lot more of a threat.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#184I'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.
Aka “craptop duty”[1].
[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#185I'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 don't think developers are the problem here. Most developers I know would love time to work on optimizations. "When can we get this shipped???? We need it yesterday", I suspect business attitude plays the greatest role.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#186Is 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?
Running Windows 11 on the same exact machine that I ran Windows 10 on, has been a dramatically worse experience performance-wise.
There are several noticeable and unforgivable performance issues that I experience regularly with WIN11.
The most-painful is that the WIN11 START MENU will occasionally (about once or twice per day) for no apparent reason, stop responding for 30-45 seconds.
During this period, keystrokes are not responded to (but they are going into the keyboard buffer). When it recovers from its "blackout" it will spit out everything in the keyboard buffer.
WTF is it doing during those 45 seconds?
I can't prove it but I would bet money that it is trying to send telemetry to the Mother-Ship and got its request "load-balanced" onto a node that is not responding.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
or just get rid of microsoft in the workplace and enjoy the absence of a terrible environment with the addition of fewer attack scenarios, better software and happier users but sad management people, but they don't do work on their machines anyway ;)
There's some terrible corporate-ware that runs on Linux and Mac, and the company policy will likely mandate the use of it.
this. in many cases the corporate-ware is worse on linux because they sell it as an afterthought
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#188Earlier 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.
It's only a waste if it doesn't lead to better performance driven by personal negative experience
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Games are lightyears ahead of 'common use software' when it comes to usability. Sure, there are bad, poorly optimized or simply unplayable games out there. But still, even the lowest of them are still insanely complex when compared to the software we are complaining here, ie. text communicators.
Agree. And there is also actual progress in the rendering engines. Modern AAA games are incomparable with what they were 10 or 20 years ago. Most desktop apps on the other hand... Yes, of course they have more features than their predecessors. But still they have the same core functionality, though. A word processor is still a word processor, but modern ones come with a latency on an every button, including the old ones that didn't have it before.
Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
#190I'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.
That was true when most software was desktop software. Most software now are Web Apps so the local speed of the development computer means less. 30 years ago there was a big difference between the performance of a current computer and a 3 year old computer. These days there isn't a huge difference and a well maintained older computer can still perform well as compared to a current computer.