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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#131

Post by Swenrekcah »

amalcon wrote: post #15
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

Open office had autosaving functionality about 15 years before MS Office managed to figure it out, despite loss of work due to unexpected power outages or Office freezing up was a regular occurrence for everyone I knew back then.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#132

Post by jandrewrogers »

didgetmaster wrote: post #11

A big part of the problem in my opinion, is that people are generally not interested in investing (money, time, effort) in technology. They focus almost exclusively on products. The short term is always given a much higher priority than long term. If someone invents a much better way (faster, easier, cheaper) to do some key part of a widely used product (operating system, database, file system, network protocol), the…

The positioning heuristic is to never sell a "drop-in replacement", there are myriad reasons that goes poorly. In addition to the problem of feature parity, you also have the extremely painful and expensive implied migration which companies are loathe to do if at all avoidable, you will show up as a threat to the companies you are replacing, possibly with much larger marketing budgets for pushing you out of their market, and you have people whose job is tied to the thing you are replacing quietly sabotaging the deal inside the customer. 10x performance usually won't cover the cost of these issues, in my experience it requires more like 100x performance before the customer calculus starts to swing in your favor.

Often you want to position your product to augment their existing systems by addressing a clear gap and nothing more, solving a single serious pain point without actually replacing anything of note. This is simpler and meets less resistance in enterprises, and once inside it becomes much easier to attrit tasks handled by other systems. Land and expand.

The challenge for startup founders that want to avoid being a "drop-in replacement" is finding true gaps in the market that are also scalable. Obvious gaps almost always have a reason they are left unfilled.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#133

Post by nicbou »

Seconds matter an awful lot to me. If things don't happen fast enough, I end up alt-tabbing to the browser, losing my train of thought, and perhaps wasting a few minutes browsing the web.

I also work semi-offline a lot. My current internet connection is roughly 100 KBps. The connection in the underground isn't much better. I also work in airports and hotels. These pages that take 10+ seconds to load end up being abandoned.

Amazon famously measured how slow pages correlate with lost revenue.

You don't really notice this until you use something significantly faster, and you can stay focused on the task much longer. Things just work better. It's like using a sharp knife for the first time.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#135

Post by [deleted] »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

[deleted]

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#136

Post by lkbm »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #37
radicalbyte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain. Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all…

> Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database I remember a long, long time ago firing up Access. I quickly closed it and continued to use Excel as a database. As it was only for personal use this wasn't an issue.

When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in the first row! I also tried putting my data into Access.

I hated Access and eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile, I pretty quickly decided that Excel is the fastest and overall best Microsoft product by a mile. I now just use Google Sheets, but if you have Windows and need to do lots of spreadsheeting, Excel is just by far the way to go. Far, far better than Libre Office, Numbers, or Google Sheets.

To be fair, I was rarely dealing with more than a couple thousand rows. If it were millions, and complicated joins, maybe Access (or probably SQLite) would be better, but oh my god, how is Excel so much faster and more polished than everything else? (Rhetorical question: Joel on Software has some stories that help answer.)

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#137

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

another_kel wrote: post #96
citrin_ru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware…

> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable? Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. People whine about bloate…

Frankly, I don't see much difference in functionality between 1996 ICQ and 2023 Whatsapp or Telegram. Why people keep reinventing the wheel?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#138

Post by nirvdrum »

dalmo3 wrote: post #121
nirvdrum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. I don't use Slack because I want to. I use it because I must. When we had open protocols, you really could choose the best client. Nowadays everything is a walled garden. It's amazing just how poorly we've managed…

> I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. (...) companies are using JS-based apps not because it necessarily leads to a better user experience but because it reduces their costs. That's quite literally the market having a say.

I'm sorry, I did phrase "companies are using JS-based apps" poorly. I meant it to mean that software vendors were delivering JS-based apps. That "(...)" you used is pulling a lot of weight. You deleted all the other context I had and stitched together two paragraphs.

The explosion of JS apps is a cost saving measure for vendors that given real choice, I don't think many consumers would opt for. The point is once you have lock-in and network effects, your customers don't really have much of a choice in the matter. At the very least, you can't say that's the market speaking in favor of the substandard apps any more than you can say it's the market speaking for any other choice the vendor makes.

As a related example, I'm sure people that were using 3rd party Twitter clients aren't feeling like the market has spoken and the best app has won just because Twitter killed off their API access. Their choice to stay on the platform has nothing to do with the their new-found love of the official apps.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#139

Post by RedShift1 »

nicbou wrote: post #133

Seconds matter an awful lot to me. If things don't happen fast enough, I end up alt-tabbing to the browser, losing my train of thought, and perhaps wasting a few minutes browsing the web. I also work semi-offline a lot. My current internet connection is roughly 100 KBps. The connection in the underground isn't much better. I also work in airports and hotels. These pages that take 10+ seconds to load end up being aban…

Would you wait for 15 to 20 seconds for an SPA to load, if it's guaranteed to work faster during usage, or have it load in 1 second but be slower while using it?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#140

Post by runevault »

ajmurmann wrote: post #126
runevault wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I run into a lot of devs on reddit/here/etc that argue "who cares about performance just spin up more containers! I just wanna write {insert slow interpreted language here}."

The slowness of interpreted languages is frequently not the main culprit for slow performance though. Most load times in web apps I've worked on usually were spent doing inefficient or unnecessary DB queries or API requests.

This is the claim but it isn't necessarily true as often as it is claimed. If it was how would Stack overflow back in the .NET framework days have managed on I think 2 web servers plus a failover on the massive amount of traffic they do while also being responsive. There's 0 chance a python/ruby/etc web app could have done the same thing. And to think they could theoretically use less CPU and RAM on the same workload now running in .NET 6 which is dramatically more efficient than 4.x Framework.
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