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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#141

Post by energy123 »

ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

Can't they use ML to predict where I'm going to click, and pre-cache the predicted page whenever the predicted button doesn't mutate important state? Or skip the difficult ML and have some basic rule of thumb that pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain, and conditioned on those pages being low bandwidth to pre-load.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#142

Post by paulhebert »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #138
asdfman123 wrote: post #129

What about these reasons? - Your boss/most of the market doesn't care if your software is slightly slow - Your boss/the market wants new features It's easier now to slip in fun optimization features when no one's looking, but the incentives are still off.

I can't tell if you are saying the market doesn't care if your software is slow, or quoting someone else. Either way it's objectively false and that has been known for decades. Making users wait is a surefire way to make them engage with your product less, and the more you make them wait the less they will use it. If your boss doesn't care about your software being slow he's incompetent. https://services.google.com/f…

The market cares. In my experience it’s harder to make your boss care.

It’s often been hard for me to make coworkers care as well which is even more frustrating.

Unless your job really prioritizes performance and builds in benchmarking people often focus on finishing a feature as fast as possible and ignore performance (and accessibility, bugs, UI polish, etc.)

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#144

Post by anon-3988 »

Yes, simply stop using JavaScript and give me static webpages. Done. I don't give a fuck if your website have a nice effect that follows my cursor, I just think about the amount of energy, effort and time wasted on making this demo.

See https://deepseek.com/harness/en/

Is anyone really impressed by this gimmick anymore? Just give me a blank HTML with . Its fine. I dont think anyone care.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#145

Post by [deleted] »

ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

[deleted]

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#147

Post by senderista »

Aurornis wrote: post #68
mccoyb wrote: post #55

Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Massalin, STOKE is more recent: https://github.com/StanfordPL/stoke ) The only novelty is that the proposer is now way better with LMs. Further, there's a large number of reasons for software writ…

> - The knobs you'd need to get serious performance are nearly unreachable in languages which LMs are good at (even Rust requires a discipline that the default language doesn't enforce). When you drop into the lower realms, you're trading consumption context for access to these levers. The levers are also "soft": you find yourself writing a bunch of skills, and tools to try and enforce the discipline. Hasn’t been my…

Agreed, IME Fable can churn out decent SIMD kernels optimized for whatever tradeoffs you give it.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#148

Post by eaftan »

I've been working on a similar agentically engineered regex project called SafeRE:

https://github.com/eaftan/safere

https://eaftan.github.io/safere-intro/

Mine is for Java and is intended to be production grade. The first goal is to guarantee linear-time behavior to prevent ReDoS attacks. My collaborator and I have recently been optimizing it to try to surpass native RE2 in performance.

It turns out optimizations are incredibly well suited for an agentic loop. You've got concrete acceptance criteria (must show a meaninging improvement on a benchmark case, must pass tests). The agent is really, really good at using tools like a profiler and disassembler, better than I am (and I've been doing this for 20 years). It also papers over things that would take me a while to learn, like how the in-incubation Vector (SIMD) API works in Java. I understand the concept but it would take me a while to understand Java's implementation. The agent can just read the docs and go.

The key is creating a good benchmark suite and ensuring the agent doesn't ship optimizations that are too narrow or too focused on the benchmark cases. You also need a really strong test suite to make sure you're not regressing correctness. SafeRE has billions of tests; a subset of several million run on CI, and the others run on-demand.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#149

Post by radium3d »

anon-3988 wrote: post #144

Yes, simply stop using JavaScript and give me static webpages. Done. I don't give a fuck if your website have a nice effect that follows my cursor, I just think about the amount of energy, effort and time wasted on making this demo. See https://deepseek.com/harness/en/ Is anyone really impressed by this gimmick anymore? Just give me a blank HTML with . Its fine. I dont think anyone care.

Sites can be fast with PHP and JavaScript. The slowness you see is mostly coming from all the frameworks too many developers "include" willy nilly with code that can only be described as bloat because 99% of it is completely unused, yet being loaded and computed by the browser on every load. That's what you're experiencing on too many websites.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#150

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

energy123 wrote: post #141
ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

Can't they use ML to predict where I'm going to click, and pre-cache the predicted page whenever the predicted button doesn't mutate important state? Or skip the difficult ML and have some basic rule of thumb that pre-caches frequent button clicks, using a markov chain, and conditioned on those pages being low bandwidth to pre-load.

If we stored the edges (links) and nodes (pages) separately, rather than requiring you to blindly run a node's code just to discover what its edges might be, then you could skip the prediction and instead pre-cache the next hop for all edges just in case you follow one. You could even do this to two or three hops.

This might seem wasteful, but if the web were content addressed instead of server addressed you could then be serving that cache to your municipality even after it became disconnected from the rest of the internet. Which sort of recasts it not like wastefulness but instead like fault tolerance and preparedness.

We could maybe even dispense with the servers entirely.

There are so many different ways to build a web. Why does it feel like we've landed on the worst possible one?

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