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Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

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Re: Slow Software

#211

Post by dvdkon »

coder543 wrote: post #70
godDLL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While running a Linux stack may still work, your Mac info is outdated by three years, at least. Macs have entered the zoo in 2015.

For practical purposes, that's not true. Macs do not allow running unsigned software by default, and no one runs antivirus on Mac, ever. So even if they were commonly being infected, which they aren't, the person above would have organizational indemnity if someone were infected because they're following industry best practices by not running antivirus on Mac. If you want, you can further restrict Macs to only App St…

The privilege escalation vulnerabilities that have been found in Mac OS in the last few years have made me distrust its security. It's not like Apple can't create secure OSs (see iOS), they just don't seem to care nearly as much about macs. All the "security" changes (that I've seen) they've made have been implementing an iOS-esque walled garden with the premise being that trusting Apple is better for security (which is probably true, but I think many users will turn these limitations off as soon as they hit them).

I used to really like Mac OS X, but nowadays it feels much less polished and much more annoying. It might just be nostalgia, but I remember Leopard being more responsive and having fewer pop-ups (Screw you, iCloud! I don't want to synchronise my files!).

Re: Slow Software

#212

Post by wincy »

throwaway286 wrote: post #56

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…

On the other hand, I just started at a Fortune 500 and the IT configuration has been non intrusive even as a developer. The only time I had issues (I got locked out and had to ping a support guy) was when I was using WSL trying to authenticate through the proxy and probably hammering it with weird requests which was flagged as suspicious behavior. Fair enough. But working somewhere that has their act together is a dream, and I’ve been able to be productive immediately because of good decisions in IT.

Re: Slow Software

#213

Post by setquk »

dagw wrote: post #151
setquk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there’s NTFS behind that. Just use a VM. Ten times faster.

Ten times faster at what? Do you have any benchmarks?

Writing and reading lots of small files on disk. Which is basically what 90% of Unixes are.

Re: Slow Software

#214

Post by rrix2 »

NVRM wrote: post #207
dandare wrote: post #160

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prior…

Java

Can you expand on this?

Re: Slow Software

#215

Post by Bjartr »

nugator wrote: post #208
dandare wrote: post #160

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prior…

Amen, the Android share menu. Seems like it tries to go through the entire history of my previous shares to see what is most popular, then asks every app that enables sharing to list their respective sharing targets. Some of these apps also checks which of its own sharing targets are most popular (like the sms app and Messenger). Finally it renders a long list that to me feels random each time and not always relevant…

I recently learned I could long press share targets and pin them. So the fine I actually use in the list of a couple dozen actually show up first now.

Re: Slow Software

#216

Post by vanderZwan »

gleenn wrote: post #2

I like how the site is an example of very fast software, such a simple design and it renders immediately; a single file load with the tiniest of javascript to make the videos work. A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred!

> A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred!

Nitpick: not really a full page load. The text part is 14 KiB, but once the website finished downloading the images and videos it's 14 MiB. However, because it does so via lazy loading (same for the PNGs), the text-parts are instantly rendered, and because it downloads all of the videos you have no buffering latency when clicking.

So yeah, near-perfect example of how to design a website for low-latency while still maintaining rich media (the thumbnail PNGs could have been JPGs to save more data, and more importantly: lazy-load even faster).

Re: Slow Software

#217

Post by nicoburns »

voltagex_ wrote: post #18

I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…

> I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.

Indeed, I've spent £40 on upgrading a whole load of friends' laptops to SSDs (fast SSDs are pretty cheap these days!), and the difference is night and day on windows 10.

Re: Slow Software

#218

Post by Paul_S »

throwaway286 wrote: post #56

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…

Same here. It's faster to compile in a VM because the VM doesn't suffer from the antivirus bollocks. Insane.

Re: Slow Software

#219

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

viraptor wrote: post #31
coder543 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen JIRA be "pretty fast", so I can't agree. I also think "2000 different fields" is an unfair exaggeration, if we're going to focus on being fair. The 10 to 20 fields that people might use per issue should not prevent JIRA from being fast with the right architecture.

Same. JIRA is just slow, even in basic configuration. Which is always annoying me because JIRA is 99% read-only. They could generate most of the pages and cache them until anything changes. Even pre-generate then on change. But every time you view an issue, it takes multiple seconds again.

This is a common 'but sometimes' issue in software engineering.

Caching works for 99.9% of cases, 'but sometimes', I click on an issue and it was just updated just before my page rendered.

Re: Slow Software

#220

Post by otoburb »

silviogutierrez wrote: post #57
throwaway286 wrote: post #56

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…

>>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.

This is a question of shifting liability and sharing responsibility. If a brick falls when you knew the facade needed maintenance, then the liability falls solely on the building. If the scaffolding falls, then the liability is borne by the scaffolding company, or at least shared.

If people you respect are pointing towards antivirus protection, you might also want to inquire whether they are saying this purely out of technical reasons (i.e. surface attack area, which could be debated), or if there are financial risk management factors tipping in this direction.

Since you're picking the OS for everybody in your company, which presumably includes multiple departments and staff who are non-technical, it seems like madness that you'd let them run amok without some level of antivirus.

But -- leave the poor developers alone. One hopes that the company was capable of hiring technical staff practicing basic day-to-day security hygene.

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