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Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

131–140 of 272 posts

Re: Slow Software

#131

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without…

Install vmware and work in vm. The av should only check one file at opening. With ssd overhead will be minimal.

Re: Slow Software

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote some Python to convert a long yaml file into jira epics/stories/deploys to avoid having to use the UI for anything aside checking what I have on my todo. Has already saved me more than it took to write.

That's great for you, but I'd bet no one else can effectively use your scripts. The beauty of the UI is that anyone can use it almost immediately.

The beauty of a shit-filled moat is that anybody can wade in without having to be able to jump it.

Re: Slow Software

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? I still use an ancient OnePlusX that I got when it came out and I've disabled all UI animations, toggling most settings (with legitimate exceptions like activating the wifi hotspot feature) feels almost instant, certainly nothing close to 300 ms. Admittedly, I haven't used any iPhone in many years, so I can't really compare.

> Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? Agreed, and as the recent example with the iPhone calculator proved, Apple aren't exactly immune to this either.

Can you just disable animations on Apple devices the way you can on Android?

Re: Slow Software

#134

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without…

I'm currently picking the OS stack for all machines at my company. All guidance, even people I respect, point towards antivirus protection. Yet I lean towards nixing that. I know it's hugely ineffective. In fact, it opens up holes of its own[1]. And yet... it's like scaffolding in NYC[2]. Absolutely useless[3]. But if you are all for removing it, and a brick falls and hurts someone, heads will roll. Quite a quandary…

Eh, I’d like to see some data on NYC scaffolds. They do collapse and hurt people, but the sheer volume of pedestrians and construction work makes me skeptical that it’s just as bad to have them as not have them. Not to mention the fact that it gives construction workers a way to not block the sidewalk with equipment and personnel.

Re: Slow Software

#135
Well, that's all good but it doesn't explain how did we get there. I think, Moore's law resulted in a resource curse for PC and mobile. Unlike with the shared computers from the past and cloud services from now, you pay not for the resources you use, but for the resources you own. And under the Moore's law they grew exponentially for quite a while, so the software simply followed the trend growing exponentially in overheads, too. Technical reasons are probably secondary, since we do still have real-time computing, and high-performance computations in their own respected niches. It's not that all software is inherently bad, it really depends on what it is for. I believe, the socio-economical reasons of the current state of software are most interesting and the least researched.

Re: Slow Software

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote some Python to convert a long yaml file into jira epics/stories/deploys to avoid having to use the UI for anything aside checking what I have on my todo. Has already saved me more than it took to write.

That's great for you, but I'd bet no one else can effectively use your scripts. The beauty of the UI is that anyone can use it almost immediately.

Everyone in engineering can use it if they want, it’s in our “fun tools” repo. I have better things to do than to navigate through ticket creation UI 20 times

Re: Slow Software

#137

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without…

Do you have enough resources (and permissions) to run VirtualBox? That way you can run a VM and get complete control. You can do things inside the VM and anti-virus will not be in the picture. I do this in my case but for different reasons and not performance.

I've tried to do this, but I think the anti-virus software breaks performance by doing strange stuff to the disk images whenever they're being written.

Re: Slow Software

#138
Only since I work fulltime with gcc hogging all my CPUs and most of my RAM for up to 10 minutes at a time and also slowing down the computer I fully appreciate having worked in dynamic languages for many years. Yes, that problem might be solvable with a beefy build box.

Re: Slow Software

#139
post #130
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work laptop is an i7 with 16GB RAM and I sometimes see this delay in inputs when running Visual Studio. I type a line of code then wait a few seconds for it to appear. Weird thing is when it does this, I'm not using all the memory and the CPU is normally sitting way below 50%. I've no idea why it sometimes just gets unusably slow.

Cpu sitting below 100% indicates that the program is spending time waiting for a data fetch from disk or memory.

Or it does not use all cores.

Re: Slow Software

#140

My least favorite type of latency is when you start typing and the application takes at least 1 - 2 seconds to catch up with you. This still happen to me often enough to be a normal occurrence on both my desktop computer and phone.

I work with Embarcadero Rapid SQL and I got used to these hiccups already, sometimes up to 10 seconds delay. I don't want to start on how crappy software is in terms of user experience, but I see people getting their jobs done with it and not complaining just one bit. Should I think I got spoiled with snappy fast barebones editors? I'm getting better at ignoring the ugliness and I feel it's a good exercise of willpow…

> Rapid SQL

> 10 seconds delay

Oh the irony.

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