221–230 of 324 posts
The geostationary satellite example, while interesting, is kinda obsolete in the age of Starlink
The overlap of people that don’t know what TCP Slow Start is and those that should care about their website loading a few milliseconds faster is incredibly small. A startup should focus on, well, starting up, not performance; a corporation large enough to optimise speed on that level will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess.
This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software prod…
Debian Slim is Similarly, K8s is of course just a container orchestration platform, but since it’s so easy to add to, people do so without knowing what they’re doing, and you wind up with 20 network hops to get out of the cluster.
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This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software prod…
Performance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, b…
Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.
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Also the assumption that my userbase uses low latency satellite connections, and are somehow unable to put up with my website, when every other website in current existence is multiple megabytes.
There was no such assumption, that was just the first example after which he mentions normal roundtrip latencies are usually in the 100-300ms range. Just because everything else is bad, doesn't invalidate the idea that you should do better. Today's internet can feel painfully slow even on a 1Gbps connection because of this; websites were actually faster in the early 2000s, during the transition to ADSL, as they still…
I get this all the time at my job, when I recommend a team do something differently in their schema or queries: “do we have any examples of teams currently doing this?” No, because no one has ever cared to try. I understand not wanting to be guinea pigs, but you have a domain expert asking you to do something, and telling you that they’ll back you up on the decision, and help you implement it. What more do you want?!
Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…
It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.
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So, anyone serious about sustainable future should stop using Python and stop recommending it as introduction to programming language? I remember one test that showed Python using 75x more energy than C to perform the same task.
I'm just investigating why the nightly backup of the work server is taking so long. Turns out python (as conda, anaconda, miniconda, etc) have dumped 22 million files across the home directories, and this takes a while to just list, let alone work out which files have changed and need archiving. Most of these are duplicates of each other, and files that should really belong to the OS, like bin/curl. I myself have ins…
14kB is a stretch goal, though trying to stick to the first 10 packets is a cool idea. A project I like that focuses on page size is 512kb.club [1] which is like a golf score for your site’s page size. My site [2] came in just over 71k when I measured before getting added (for all assets). This project also introduced me to Cloudflare Radar [3] which includes a great tool for site analysis/page sizing, but is mainly…
A question as a non user: What are you doing with the extra 500kB for me, the user? > 90% of the time in interested in text. Most of the reminder vector graphics would suffice. 14 kB is a lot of text and graphics for a page. What is the other 500 for?
It's fair to prefer text-only pages, but the "and graphics" is quite unrealistic in my opinion.
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This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software prod…
Containers were invented because VMs were too slow to cold start and used too much memory. Their whole raison d'être is performance.
If you're running infra at Google, of course containers and orchestration make sense.
If you're running apps/IT for an SMB or even small enterprise, they are 100% waste, churn and destruction. I've built for both btw.
The contexts in which they are appropriate and actually improve anything at all are vanishingly small.
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> That said, I do use KaTeX with client-side rendering on a limited number of pages that have mathematical content You could try replacing KaTeX with MathML: https://w3c.github.io/mathml-core/
If you want to test out some examples from your website to see how they'd look in KaTeX vs. browser MathML rendering, I made a tool for that here: https://mk12.github.io/web-math-demo/
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This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software prod…
Performance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, b…
Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have.
IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand.
Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution.
It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down.
Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.