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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

#331

Post by leonidasrup »

mawadev wrote: post #289
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 agree and see this as a side effect of a subtler thing. As people shall be replacable, software is designed and subtly mimics the organization's communication patterns. Features are cut up into the tiniest pieces with clear separation from the start (at least its claimed), and over time whatever change or feature seems overly complicated, won't be done or won't be done in a sane manner because its uneconomical. You…

Oracle:

    "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
— Bryan Cantrill

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

#332

Post by fc417fc802 »

adrian_b wrote: post #315
fc417fc802 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're running proprietary drivers? Because I've never experienced anything like that on mesa. Launching an app that opens a window with a gl or vk context is so fast on my almost 10 year old hardware that it's nearly imperceptible.

There must be some quirk of whatever combination of software packages are installed there, but the proprietary drivers are not the culprit, at least not alone (i.e. there could be some interaction with other software packages with which I have little experience, like Gnome). I have been using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for more than 2 decades on various hardware, both desktops and laptops, mostly with Gentoo Linu…

So the usual self inflicted misconfiguration then.

In similar style I recently wiped a device that I thought had firmware that was slow to boot but it turns out that a hang and subsequent timeout due to something I had long ago misconfigured had been obscured by the previous setup that defaulted to hiding all details during boot.

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

#333

Post by cavem0nkey »

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…

Yes. Apple Music is the most egregious example of this. It could be ridiculously fast on your pocket supercomputer but the moment a web request gets fired off from stumbling blindly across the field-of-dung user interface, bam, you’re done. Especially if your network connection isn’t great at that time.

Things like this really pushed me to everything local systems. I’ll move actual files around if I want to do anything on the network. Or sometimes even use cables! Shock, horror!

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

#334

Post by abanana »

jjcm wrote: post #70

This speaks to me. I've been running an autoresearch loop the past couple of days to improve the load time of my various projects' frontends. I've been really, really impressed with how effective this is. I went from a 4s load on simulated slow 4g to ~750ms: https://image.non.io/speedup-graphs.webp Side by side vid of the results: https://video.non.io/speedups.mp4 This was for https://non.io , which is something I ha…

An annoyance: clicking an image transitions the tiny image to a bigger size, then it gets replaced with a larger image file. The result is: the image slides bigger (but blurred), then immediately disappears, and reloads slowly from the top down. It's an annoying flash, and the slide to a bigger size was a waste of time.

That seriously needs some optimising. For example: on click, could the bigger image be inserted behind the small one so it's hidden; on load of the bigger image, hide the smaller image; then do the slide-bigger transition with both images together?

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

#335

Post by ponector »

chvid wrote: post #253

ChatGPT MacOSX is the only software that regularly crashes on my machine when its memory consumption for no apparent reason spins up towards 50 GB. And that software is build by some of the highest paid software engineers on the planet with full access to all the LLM compute in the world.

Coding is a solved problem. They simply don't care if the app is full of bugs. You are using it anyway, right?

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

#336

Post by locallost »

intrasight wrote: post #62

I've been using computers for 4 decades. They have gotten no faster. The nuclear plant computer system we built in 1989 had to present selected screens in 1 second. I don't think any apps I use today can do that.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

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

#337

Post by dkersten »

> Completely agree with your closing point. Dynamic custom software, fitted to a particular workload rather than a class of workloads, seems like a very likely outcome.

I disagree with the premise that this is the desired outcome. If every piece of software is bespoke and everyone’s instance of it works slightly differently, then it’s impossible to get support or a shared knowledge of how it works. There’s no “just share the excel file”, there’s no “press the this button on the left”, there’s no “oh I use program X to solve Y” (instead you have to know what you need so the custom software can solve it, but my time in startups taught me that most users don’t know what they want or need).

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

#338

Post by korijn »

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…

Incredible that the top reply is a cop out.

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

#339

Post by momocowcow »

hunterpayne wrote: post #197

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly." This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its a…

I remember the co-founder of Anduril Industries being the author of this tweet!

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

#340

Post by bdhdhduuyd »

MaxL93 wrote: post #325
bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #264

For me the comparison has always been 3DsMax vs Blender. Same kind of software, same kind of features, but Blender is so much faster. Architectural decisions have always been important.

You could compare it to Windows vs. Linux in a sense. 3ds Max has decades of legacy plugin/SDK compatibility baggage, lots of commercial and contractual obligations with business/enterprise customers... and Blender has none of those things weighing it down.

Well, I have been using 3DsMax and Blender from the early versions and it's always been the case that Blender is way faster.

Legacy baggage has nothing to do with it, in my opinion.

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