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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

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

#161

Post by spaqin »

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.

The problem isn't in preloading, it's in how much data needs to be sent while quite probably most of the data could be either fetched on startup in an efficient format and rendered natively, or is completely unnecessary in the first place (telemetry, ads).

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

#162

Post by asdfman123 »

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…

Experiments demonstrate that increasing web search latency 100 to 400 ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%

It obviously depends a lot on what you do, but often that doesn't matter.

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

#163

Post by markerz »

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.

So Next.JS actually pre-fetches links when they move into the viewport or you hover over it. It's interesting, but then you get wasted battery on mobile while on bad networks. The world is full of tradeoffs. Tech workers tend to want to consume more battery and data to be faster. Other people want to do less work.

https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/prefetching#hover-trigger...

In my view, websites should not take seconds to load with gigabit fiber. Whatever happened to "mobile first"?

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

#164

Post by jcelerier »

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…

I have a new laptop with a rtx 5090. Opening any GL context takes more than half a second. There's tons of things that can be optimized and are pretty far from web.

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

#165

Post by esikich »

Kuyawa wrote: post #146

Next time you ask your AI of choice to build an app, please tell them to use plain language without frameworks at all and keep modules to a minimum (ie. node express, ejs and pg, nothing else) and you will see a huuuuge difference

Yep, I feel like there's less of a reason to use frameworks now that you can just have it bash out only the needed stuff on its own. I've been able to make some really really tiny C tools and I'm absolutely loving it.

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

#166

Post by jmtulloss »

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…

I’ve been playing with this with software that needs to work with agents and also without internet at all (we’re serving construction projects that have limited access)

Obviously agent access goes away with internet failure but the state doesn’t need to… we use CRDTs and a virtual FS. There’s a toy-ish version of the harness at https://ourhearth.ai … if local first is interesting to you I’d love your feedback

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

#167

Post by userbinator »

jcelerier wrote: post #164
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…

I have a new laptop with a rtx 5090. Opening any GL context takes more than half a second. There's tons of things that can be optimized and are pretty far from web.

We can only hope that the company building the hardware on which this new age of AI is based on soon starts "vibe-optimising" their own driver stack.

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

#168

Post by hiddencost »

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…

> A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective

Reasons this doesn't follow: (1) Benchmarks never match real world use, and many optimizations the improve benchmarks degrade cases that aren't measured (think about how CPU cache behavior can be surprising) (2) In software performance optimization, frequently there is significant noise, from many sources. This makes it difficult to guarantee that a measured change is actually an improvement.

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

#170

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Onavo wrote: post #154
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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. Welcome to Next.js

Can next.js give me a page's links without requiring that I execute any code that I didn't have prior to visiting that page?

The .js part makes me think not.

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