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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#331

Post by bflesch »

crubier wrote: post #305
maccard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

HOW does Slack take 20s to load for you? My huge corporate Slack takes 2.5s to cold load. I'm so dumbfounded. Maybe non-MacOS, non-Apple silicon stuff is complete crap at that point? Maybe the complete dominance of Apple performance is understated?

Most likely the engineers at many startups only use apple computers themselves and therefore only optimize performance for those systems. It's a shame but IMO result of their incompetence and not result of some magic apple performance gains.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#332

Post by jandrese »

scotty79 wrote: post #53
titzer wrote: post #12

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…

Since 1980 maybe. But since 2005 it increased maybe 5x and even that's generous. And that's half of the time that passed and two decades. https://youtu.be/m7PVZixO35c?si=px2QKP9-80hDV8Ui

2005 was Pentium 4 era.

For comparison: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1075vs5852/Intel-Pentiu...

That's about a 168x difference. That was from before Moores law started petering out.

For only a 5x speed difference you need to go back to the 4th or 5th generation Intel Core processors from about 10 years ago.

It is important to note that the speed figure above is computed by adding all of the cores together and that single core performance has not increased nearly as much. A lot of that difference is simply from comparing a single core processor with one that has 20 cores. Single core performance is only about 8 times faster than that ancient Pentium 4.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#333

Post by sabellito »

xg15 wrote: post #224
alkonaut wrote: post #181

"The world" runs on _features_ not elegant, fast, or bug free software. To the end user, there is no difference between a lack of a feature, and a bug. Nor is there any meaningful difference between software taking 5 minutes to complete something because of poor performance, compared to the feature not being there and the user having to spend 5 minutes completing the same task manually. It's "slow". If you keep maxim…

Almost all of my nontechnical friends and family members have at some point complained about bloated and overly complicated software that they are required to use. Also remember that Microsoft at this point has to drag their users kicking and screaming into using the next Windows version. If users were let to decide for themselves, many would have never upgraded past Windows XP. All that despite all the pretty new fe…

Every software you use has more bloat than useful features? Probably not. And what's useless to one user might be useful to another.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#334

Post by timbit42 »

monkeyelite wrote: post #156
titzer wrote: post #12

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…

> If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that) It doesn’t work like that. If an image processing algorithm takes 2 instructions per pixel, adding a check to every access could 3-4x the cost. This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks. The vast majority of cases it doesn’t matter at all - much less than 5%. I think safe/unsafe o…

Your argument is exactly why we ended up with the abominations of C and C++ instead of the safety of Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, Oberon, etc. Programmers at the time didn't realize how little impact safety features like bounds checking have. The bounds only need to be checked once for a for loop, not on each iteration.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#335

Post by mtalantikite »

dahart wrote: post #217
caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a compe…

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the beauty of the fragrance when you do that. She really doesn't want to go the route of mediocrity, but that does seem to be what the market demands.

[1] https://studiotanais.com/

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#336

Post by xboxnolifes »

maccard wrote: post #119
Gigachad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

That sounds like a corporate anti-virus slowing everything down to me. vscode takes a few seconds to launch for me from within WSL2, with extensions. IntelliJ on a large project takes a while I'll give you that, but just intelliJ takes only a few seconds to launch.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#337

Post by alnwlsn »

dsego wrote: post #31
freddie_mercury wrote: post #7

The world DOES run on older hardware. How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?

Doom can run on Apple's Lightning to HDMI adapter.

A USB charger is more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer: https://web.archive.org/web/20240101203337/https://forresthe...

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#338

Post by maccard »

aloha2436 wrote: post #147
maccard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and mo…

This is my third high end workstation computer in the last 5 years and my experience has been roughly consistent with.

My corporate vpn app is a disaster on so many levels, it’s an internally developed app as opposed to Okta or anything like that.

I would likewise say that your experience is not universal, and that in many circumstances the situation is much worse. My wife is running an i5 laptop from 2020 and her work intranet is a 60 second load time. Outlook startup and sync are measured in minutes including mailbox fetching. You can say this is all not the app developers fault, but the crunch that’s installed on her machine is slowing things down by 5 or 10x and that slowdown wouldn’t be a big deal if the apps had reasonable load times in the first place.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#340

Post by inoop »

caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

A hallmark of well-designed and well-written software is that it is easy to replace, where bug-ridden spaghetti-bowl monoliths stick around forever because nobody wants to touch them.

Just through pure Darwinism, bad software dominates the population :)

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