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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

#401

Post by mike_hearn »

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?

Yes it is and the difference isn't understated, I think everyone knows by now that Apple has run away with laptop/desktop performance. They're just leagues ahead.

It's a mix of better CPUs, better OS design (e.g. much less need for aggressive virus scanners), a faster filesystem, less corporate meddling, high end SSDs by default... a lot of things.

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

#402

Post by mike_hearn »

tjader wrote: post #78
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…

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

Windows 11 shell partly uses React Native in the start button flyout. It's not a heavily optimized codebase.

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

#403

Post by wang_li »

rpnx wrote: post #345
dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality. It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers. It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains…

> but only if they know the software is higher quality.

I assume all software is shit in some fashion because every single software license includes a clause that has "no fitness for any particular purpose" clause. Meaning, if your word processor doesn't process words, you can't sue them.

When we get consumer protection laws that require that software does what is says on the tin quality will start mattering.

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

#404

Post by vel0city »

xnorswap wrote: post #397
vel0city wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get any kind of spinner on Outlook opening emails. Especially emails which are pure text or only lightly stylized open instantly. Even emails with calendar invites load really fast, I don't see any kind of spinner graphic at all. Running latest Outlook on Windows 11, currently >1k emails in my Inbox folder, on an 11th gen i5, while also on a Teams call a ton of other things active on my machine. This is also…

I guess I shall screen record it, this is new-ish windows 11 laptop. ( This might also be a "new outlook" vs "out outlook" thing? )

I am using New Outlook.

I don't doubt it's happening to you, but I've never experienced it. And I'm not exactly using bleeding edge hardware here. A several year old i5 and a Ryzen 3 3200U (a cheap 2019 processor in a cheap Walmart laptop).

Maybe your IT team has something scanning every email on open. I don't know what to tell you, but it's not the experience out of the box on any machine I've used.

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

#405

Post by mike_hearn »

xnorswap wrote: post #105
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…

It vastly depends on what software you're forced to use. Here's some software I use all the time, which feels horribly slow, even on a new laptop: Slack. Switching channels on slack, even when you've just switched so it's all cached, is painfully slow. I don't know if they build in a 200ms or so delay deliberately to mask when it's not cached, or whether it's some background rendering, or what it is, but it just feel…

Some of this is due to the adoption of React. GUI optimization techniques that used to be common are hard to pull off in the React paradigm. For instance, pre-rendering parts of the UI that are invisible doesn't mesh well with the React model in which the UI tree is actually being built or destroyed in response to user interactions and in which data gets loaded in response to that, etc. The "everything is functional" paradigm is popular for various legitimate reasons, although React isn't really functional. But what people often forget is that functional languages have a reputation for being slow...

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

#406

Post by zahlman »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

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…

How long did your computer take to start up, from power off (and no hibernation, although that presumably wasn't a thing yet), the first time you got to use a computer?

How long did it take the last time you had to use an HDD rather than SSD for your primary drive?

How long did it take the first time you got to use an SSD?

How long does it take today?

Did literally anything other than the drive technology ever make a significant difference in that, in the last 40 years?

> Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook

Instantly? Your applications don't have splash screens? I think you've probably just gotten used to however long it does take.

> 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems.

"An iPhone 11, which has 4GB of RAM (32x what the first-gen model had), can run the operating system and display a current-day webpage that does a few useful things with JavaScript".

This should sound like clearing a very low bar, but it doesn't seem to.

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

#407

Post by zahlman »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #390
KapKap66 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerate…

I fear that such comments are similar to the old 'a monster cable makes my digital audio sound more mellow!' The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful.

>The eye percieves at about 10 hz. That's 100ms per capture. All the rest, I'd have to see a study that shows how any higher framerate can possibly be perceived or useful.

It takes effectively no effort to conduct such a study yourself. Just try re-encoding a video at different frame rates up to your monitor refresh rate. Or try looking at a monitor that has a higher refresh rate than the one you normally use.

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

#408

Post by mike_hearn »

grumpymuppet wrote: post #45
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

This is something I've wished to eliminate too. Maybe we just cast the past 20 years as the "prototyping phase" of modern infrastructure. It would be interesting to collect a roadmap for optimizing software at scale -- where is there low hanging fruit? What are the prime "offenders"? Call it a power saving initiative and get environmentally-minded folks involved.

Use of underpowered databases and abstractions that don't eliminate round-trips is a big one. The hardware is fast but apps take seconds to load because on the backend there's a lot of round-trips to the DB and back, and the query mix is unoptimized because there are no DBAs anymore.

It's the sort of thing that can be handled via better libraries, if people use them. Instead of Hibernate use a mapper like Micronaut Data. Turn on roundtrip diagnostics in your JDBC driver, look for places where they can be eliminated by using stored procedures. Have someone whose job is to look out for slow queries and optimize them, or pay for a commercial DB that can do that by itself. Also: use a database that lets you pipeline queries on a connection and receive the results asynchronously, along with server languages that make it easy to exploit that for additional latency wins.

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

#409

Post by mtalantikite »

arolihas wrote: post #372
ayewo wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?

looks like they are trying native advertising first

That's actually been new for her, maybe the past two or so months after 10 years in business, and it seems to be working better than any other type of advertising she's done in the past.

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

#410

Post by naasking »

rjbwork wrote: post #381
naasking wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improv…

I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!

Agreed, but it doesn't go far enough IMO. Why not add language/runtime support for durable list comprehensions, and also atomically updatable ones so they can be concurrently shared, etc. Bring the database into the language in a way that's just as easily to use and query as any other value.
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