Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#221

Post by GordonS » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #207

GordonS wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep seems to have gotten slower and slower over the years too - the web version is practically unusable on mobile, not just because the UI design isn't responsive (!), but because it's so painfully slow. Boggles the mind how Google web apps have performance issues like this.

Wait, you think https://mail.google.com/mail/mu , the mobile web version aka "superpudu" is slow? Can you tell me your device? It paints itself in only 400ms on my iphone. I actually prefer it over the app because it's so fast.

My comments were about Google Keep, not Gmail, though I do actually find the Gmail web app pretty slow too - it takes several seconds to send an email.

I didn't know there was some kind of secret mobile Web version of Gmail - I get a blank white page when I open your link on mobile tho (using Brave)?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#222

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

dochtman wrote: post #58

My pet peeve is that a lot of the GCP console doesn't even seem to work in Firefox. For example: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/61522

Feature-chasing. Firefox compatibility is a feature that nets them something like 5% of potential users. When they crunch the numbers, that's fewer than the 3 to 5 corporations they can get into their scope of market if they add the table-stakes features those corps require to consider GCP.

And Google's take on it is that a FF user can always switch to Chrome, since Chrome runs on all OSs that support FF.

FF support is, in theory, part of the acceptance criteria for new development, but it's not on the blocking list so it's not really part of the acceptance criteria.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#223

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

jynelson wrote: post #209

choathedolls wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they…

This is such a depressing take. "I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!"

They're not saying it's ok. They are saying that the overall system (the business-business-management-employee complex) prevents optimization of this UI from being a priority.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#224

Post by turtlebits » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

The AWS console isn't fast either (just shy of 1 MB of data transferred). I chalk it up to -

1. So many services all living in the same place with a variety of UI components 2. The complexity of turning all the knobs and dials of building infrastructure (or multiple pieces) into a UI. 3. Being an ancillary service (admin UI).

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#225

Post by sieabahlpark » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

thanksforthe42 wrote: post #161

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…

After working with graduates from "the best university", I doubt it is "the best". After using "the best" search engine, and finding what I needed on Bing instead, I started doubting it was "the best". Perception is different than reality. I genuinely wonder if these are "the best", or if these employees were merely the ones willing to move their lives to a new city for a high paying job. But I'm sure FAANG and FAANG…

They built a language to simplify development and maintenance because their employees weren't the best.

I think it's safe to assume a majority of Google isn't the best.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#226

Post by neya » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

Blame the new hipster driven development with Javascript where it's ok to shove down a 100s of mb worth of assets into your user's browser whether they consent to it or not, all because you can load some fancy animations and write a blog post on your cool new JS stack.

An average react JS app built using create react app actually costs you in megabytes, not kilobytes, which has somehow become the new normal.

But hey, I'm not complaining. I make money turning these slow sites fast by bringing them down to a 50-100kb total. Not complaining!

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#227

Post by blibble » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #155

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.

>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is just me but if I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere.

they don't care about the opinion of the people using the awful UI, they care about the executives signing the contract after being wined and dined

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#228

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #165

Here's an anecdote: my partner used to work at PayPal, and they had a entire team dedicated to just the "wallet" portion of the web UI. There were reasons for this: that piece of the UI had to work in all nationalities, for all languages and currencies, in every browser on every device under the sun. But here's what I'm thinking: I wouldn't be surprised if every single tab in the Google Cloud UI had its own team, wit…

You're on the right track.

A team does exist to consider the whole Dashboard, but they were late to ramp up and were initially extremely under-staffed.

GCP's UI grew out of needing to unify features between Storage and the App Engine UIs, which were initially completely separate codebases. The solution started with "Just port the App Engine stuff into whatever Storage is using." But then they tried to extrapolate that model to every sub-component, and it went... Not great. And engineering management were late to realize how badly it was going.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#229

Post by markdog12 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

markdog12 wrote: post #204

_Microft wrote: post #15

User to Dev: the memory usage is excessive. Dev with 256 GB RAM to User: WFM I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to developers having above-average network connections and super beefy computers. Combine that with fresh or minimal installs while testing the software, without lots of data that accumulated over month or years of use and in consequence they experience their products a…

I use this UI all day, every day on a Ryzen 3900 with 12 cores, 24 threads, 32GB RAM, 300Mbps connection. It's always extremely slow, takes up obscene amounts of CPU and RAM. It's mind-boggling how they think, "this is ok". The move to, "let's show them a pretty G spinner to compensate, because research shows that'll make them think it's fast" irks me to no end.

Here's a couple of tabs, one is a dashboard taking up 1.5GB RAM, the other is a k8s deployment page, taking up 1GB. It seems any tab takes up a ton of RAM. CPU also locks up completely in those tabs routinely. The chance that occurs correlates with how long a tab is open.

https://imgur.com/a/i9L45ZM

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#230

Post by sam0x17 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

choathedolls wrote: post #168

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is just me but if I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere.

Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they…

I think it's more that people care about the speed of the actual cloud offering, not the internal control panel. The product isn't the control panel, it's the cloud services.