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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

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Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart.

Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component logic is a direct consequence of this, as those components are ending up in the codebase as a side-effect of different segments of code, worked on by different teams, probably in different offices, "reusing" the same component---but not really, since they might be skewed on the version they're depending on. It's DLL hell in Javascript client form, basically.

And the product as a whole is chasing feature parity, not speed of UI.

The simplest way to not end up like Google Cloud UI is to not try to build a whole-product cloud solution. The second simplest way, if you're Amazon and you've already gone that road, is to have different sub-parts of your mega-architecture be different "apps" (really, different websites), each of which need pull in only the pieces it cares about, and be willing to take a whole-page refresh when the user transitions from one page to another.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#212

Post by shadowgovt »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

"Best" is a tradeoffs assessment, and Cloud is chasing "the best features," not "the best speed."

They're taking the eng-hours of the people who could be responsible for speeding up and consolidating and saying "Okay, as long as it doesn't mean we can't release high-granularity-IAM-control-based-on-user-eye-color this quarter. Because it's a non-starter to get LensCrafters on board until we have those table stakes."

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#213

Post by agentdrtran »

pimlottc wrote: post #111

The G Suite (now Google Workplace) admin console GUI is also pretty slow. What makes it worse is that you have no other choice - it's the only complete tool for administrating G Suite. There are APIs for some things, but quite a lot is only available in the GUI, and new features always show up there first (if they ever make it to the API at all). There isn't even a way to import/export settings, so you have to painst…

The Workplace admin console is unbelievably bad, and search is a joke. Not being able to search for aliases causes issues nearly daily.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#214

Post by StillBored »

manigandham wrote: post #198
doomlaser wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it that Microsoft's Electron apps are so snappy and performant? You would never know Visual Studio Code was Electron by how it performs. I'm not a user of their cloud apps, but are they similarly snappy, or is it just that Microsoft's Dev Tools team is way out in front?

Performance is a priority for VSC. Same with Azure's console. Same with sites like Stackoverflow. It's not a priority with many of Google's current apps.

Which is a problem with the dev environment. If it takes a lot of effort to make an application performant then most of the applications written in that environment will be slow.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#215

Post by sam0x17 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

The speed of GCP's internal control panel isn't going to affect Google's bottom line like it would with their search offering or other massively user facing things. Google could redo this frontend from scratch and make it really lean and fast, but they clearly don't think they need to.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#217

Post by shadowgovt »

skulk wrote: post #210
landerwust wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to the Closure Compiler stack? It was infinitely ahead of its time, how the heck did they end up settling on Angular of all things

> What happened to the Closure Compiler stack? Nothing, I still use it daily at work, alongside Angular (though not together). > how the heck did they end up settling on Angular of all things At Google, It's convenient to use Angular because there are well-documented ways to do all of the normal things you have to do to have a production-quality front-end application, such as building reusable components, dependency…

> It would be a truly herculean task to bring another framework up to the same level of support and integration of Angular inside Google.

And in fact, Cloud already did this.

Unfortunately, what they chose to bring up to the same level was... Angular, when they transitioned off AngularJS.

They moved from a framework with known performance pitfalls to a framework with slightly fewer known performance pitfalls. It was the right move for them, but it only solved a handful of the problems they were having with the previous iteration of Angular.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#219

Post by shadowgovt »

StillBored wrote: post #216

Actually, looking at this I'm surprised that the mainstream browsers are still caching javascript, but not some pre-parsed/compiled version of the code.

It'd be glorious if there were a protocol to ship something closer to "machine code" from server directly to browser, but it doesn't exist. JS is the only language one can assume the browser can actually interpret.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#220

Post by robertlagrant »

EGreg wrote: post #185
tanilama wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with you here. Make Cloud UI fast is probably not their priority. This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. They will wait. Integrity/Security would be much higher on the list than UI loading speed. Not surprising at all.

I must say after using Microsoft Teams... M$ is back, baby. I would invest in them if I invested in huge-market-cap companies. After IBM, Microsoft became the company selling Windows and Office for businesses. Huge cash cow. They lost that for a while due to the iPhone and Google and stuff moving to the Web and mobile. Now they’re back. The fonts and aesthetics remind me of using Windows apps 20 years ago. This ain’t…

> Compared to Slack, this is way better

Try scrolling up in Teams. I'll wait.

Now do it in Slack - 10 times quicker, and thus usable.

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