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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

performance.dev

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Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#61

Post by MaoSYJ »

hamandcheese wrote: post #19

I worry that optimistic updates is going to become trendy and applied to more software, but without any plan for the "sad path" - failed to sync, sync conflict, etc. Get ready for a whole new era of race conditions and frustration!

well it has been the standard for non critical feedback.

I would not implement optimistic resolution in key information, prices, for example. They live in the server and backend should keep the total control in the client side, even feedback response time.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#62

Post by andersonklando »

nilirl wrote: post #56

Am I the only that doesn't "get" Linear? Even if speed is the killer feature, isn't an issue tracker a relatively low-frequency application for a dev? Whenever I use it, I don't feel like I'm doing anything new when compared to all the other issue trackers and Kanban boards I've used before.

It is definitely way more performant than Jira + Microsoft Planner. Trello comes to mind in terms of performance. I speak from being a heavy user of Linear for my personal project and as a Jira enterprise user.

A leader of 6 will spend a lot of time in such an app, so the UX is valuable and a differentiator for them.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#64

Post by n_e »

artman wrote: post #43
prerok wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have to say, I hate this. Suppose you are in a meeting, you update something and you see the result, but the rest of the team does not. Ok, a couple of hundred ms does not play into this but if the update does not make it through? And yes, it happens.

Changes go through and synced to everyone on your team in almost realtime. If there's a conflict on the server and your change cannot be applied (almost never happens), your change is rolled back on your client, again, almost in realtime. If servers cannot be reached, we will show you a syncing badge within 4 seconds to tell you that you have made changes that haven't been sent to others yet. Strange that we can be s…

As a user, I like when things appear to sync instantly and perfectly, such as in Google Docs.

As a developer, I hated the article and many of the comments I read thus far because:

- Having clients and a server properly sync and not lose data in the event of a network failure amounts to having a consistent distributed system which is not easy to do, and the commenters don't seem to have understood that

- I hate having written a long document and then losing it because the sync code is buggy, so the previous point becomes even more important.

So reading many of the things here has been mildly infuriating.

That being said, none of these people are likely affiliated with Linear, and given the overall quality of the product I'm pretty sure it works properly.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#66

Post by yolo3000 »

ambicapter wrote: post #58
nilirl wrote: post #56

Am I the only that doesn't "get" Linear? Even if speed is the killer feature, isn't an issue tracker a relatively low-frequency application for a dev? Whenever I use it, I don't feel like I'm doing anything new when compared to all the other issue trackers and Kanban boards I've used before.

I honesty can’t say it’s better than Jira, the myriad options just make it a confusing mess to figure out how to navigate and put stuff (could be my company is just hella disorganized), and the GitHub tracking is annoyingly eager (just because the first PR has been merged doesn’t mean the ticket is done).

Maybe we work at the same company. I have the same experience. Don't know why people use it.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#67

Post by ifwinterco »

nine_k wrote: post #55
mohsen1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for Linear because the tab stays open, and worse case if tab is closed you can recover later when the tab is opened again and deal with conflict resolution. Won't work if: 1. user clicks a button and closes the tab thinking transaction is done and it's important that transaction is done 2. conflict resolution is difficult or impossible in future client wake up

The user clicks the button, the mutation is stored in local storage. The user closes the tab, but it's not a problem. A background worker picks up the mutation and sends it to the remote backend. It takes time, retries, etc. Similarly, any errors reported by the background worker go to local store, and the next time the UI tab is loaded / activated, they are shown. A service worker can show a notification outright to…

Yeah this pattern can be made to work fine.

Main downside is it significantly complicates the front end code compared to just waiting for FE to sync with BE before updating

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#68

Post by ifwinterco »

pier25 wrote: post #44
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's guaranteed persistence, but there's no guarantee that the host will be up anytime soon. E.g.: I might leave a final reply with all the details on an issue before going on vacation (or maybe I don't work the next day but my colleagues abroad do!). I see that it's properly posted and close the laptop. The reply with be delayed by days or weeks, but the UI indicated that it had been properly saved.

> There's guaranteed persistence There's not. Browsers can delete "persistent" storage at any time. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...

Edge case but playing devil’s advocate: a user can also uninstall the native app at any time, and might still expect their last change before they closed the app to be reflected in the web version.

You can never truly trust anything about a client because by definition you don’t control it

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#69

Post by singron »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #54
artman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changes go through and synced to everyone on your team in almost realtime. If there's a conflict on the server and your change cannot be applied (almost never happens), your change is rolled back on your client, again, almost in realtime. If servers cannot be reached, we will show you a syncing badge within 4 seconds to tell you that you have made changes that haven't been sent to others yet. Strange that we can be s…

(curious) What if a user closes it before 4 seconds? Ctrl+enter, it optimistically locally updates within 1 second. I close ctrl+w. But my wifi goofed and it didn't reach the server.

I have mysteriously lost comments/descriptions I wrote on issues. I figured it was related to a failed and lost opportunistic update like this, although I suppose it could have been caused by a fixable bug.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#70

Post by apothegm »

ambicapter wrote: post #58
nilirl wrote: post #56

Am I the only that doesn't "get" Linear? Even if speed is the killer feature, isn't an issue tracker a relatively low-frequency application for a dev? Whenever I use it, I don't feel like I'm doing anything new when compared to all the other issue trackers and Kanban boards I've used before.

I honesty can’t say it’s better than Jira, the myriad options just make it a confusing mess to figure out how to navigate and put stuff (could be my company is just hella disorganized), and the GitHub tracking is annoyingly eager (just because the first PR has been merged doesn’t mean the ticket is done).

Say what you will about Jira, at least it’s not a total maze.
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