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Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

231–240 of 272 posts

Re: Slow Software

#231
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Woah, TIL. Thank you!

Re: Slow Software

#232
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up writing an AutoHotkey script that would get mouse scrolling about 80% sane and manage my clipboard. I used to run AlwaysMouseWheel to fix up focus scrolling, but forgot to set it up after my last reinstall. Thanks for the reminder! :) http://www.softwareok.com/?Download=AlwaysMouseWheel As for the other stuff, ugh. I've made it a general rule not to work anywhere where I don't get root on my own box.

This is no longer needed in Windows 10.

My main work desktop is still on 8.1 and will probably remain so. Laptop is 10 and yeah, no issues there.

Re: Slow Software

#233
post #121
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ‘jank’ would refer to the same thing, as soon as it lasts longer than a few frames. E.g. the program runs consistently otherwise, but somehow freezes for 0.5s every minute or so.

My intuitive interpretation has been that `jank` is related to frame dropping but with time perception being constant (like sampling being insufficient yet played at correct times) whereas `judder` also has a sort rubberbanding effect on time, where time is perceptutally compressed or dilated as playback is delayed or "catches up", with frame dropping happening upon e.g a deadline being missed. Here, with frames 2 an…

This use of 'judder' is what I would call 'jitter'. 'Jank' I'd just call 'skipped/dropped frames'. I never realised how much this terminology varies between groups, I think it's fascinating!

Re: Slow Software

#234

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…

Vim uses an on disk file as a buffer. It's the .swp file. That's how you can open files larger than the available memory, and recover files when it crashes.

Re: Slow Software

#236
post #116

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this us…

Check out Bruce Dawson's blog, he works for Google and he writes articles on investigating slow application performance on Windows, e.g.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/

Over the last few years I’ve written over forty blog posts that discuss ETW/xperf profiling. I’ve done this because it’s one of the best profilers I’ve ever used, and it’s been woefully undersold and under documented by Microsoft. My goal has been to let people know about this tool, make it easier for developers and users to record ETW traces, and to make it as easy as possible for developers to analyze ETW traces. [..] The purpose of this page is to be a central hub that links to the ETW/xperf posts that are still relevant.

Some of my favorite blog posts are those that tell a tale of noticing some software that I use being slow, recording a trace, and figuring out the problem.

They go back a few years, he recently tweeted that Windows Performance Analyzer / ETW Trace Viewer is now available in the Microsoft Store - https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/106039652215040819...

Re: Slow Software

#237
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which, infuriatingly, is disabled in some tier-1 Google apps, including Youtube and Google News.

Re: Slow Software

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for you, but I'd bet no one else can effectively use your scripts. The beauty of the UI is that anyone can use it almost immediately.

Everyone in engineering can use it if they want, it’s in our “fun tools” repo. I have better things to do than to navigate through ticket creation UI 20 times

> I have better things to do than to navigate through ticket creation UI 20 times.

Thank you for being that sort of person.

I know some people who would take great pleasure in knowing that they would get paid for spending just that time, no matter if they achieved very little doing it.

Re: Slow Software

#239
post #44
post #5

I think this article places too much emphasis on input devices and hardware constraints, and not enough on software architecture. JIRA doesn't really feel any faster just because your input devices are fast; the application level latency dwarfs the input latency by a large margin. I would take measurements, but JIRA prohibits benchmarking for some reason... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they're probably just trying to save everyone else…

Jira is in a league of its own. With latest stable Firefox on a Macbook Pro from 2014, I get a full 10 seconds loading time for the notifications sidebar. Every click in Jira takes between 5 and 15 seconds. It is absolutely nuts and it seems like many people just don't understand how insanely bad it is (but obviously many engineers do ;) Meanwhile my browser can load, render, and scroll a 4000 line colored diff in le…

We host our own Jira on-prems behind an apache server and it's pretty fast. I am actually surprised by how fast it is.

In previous job we used jira cloud and it was terrible.

Re: Slow Software

#240
On a related subject, I've noticed that my local gas station updated their software for their fuel pumps and it is terrible. For some reason the latency is very high, so high that I can't reliably type in my PIN. It literally takes 500ms - 1000ms for key-presses to register, plus it doesn't seem to cache them very well so if you go too fast it drops the key-press altogether. Finally, they changed the font to a fancy script that is difficult to read on the low resolution display.

At first I thought it must be a hardware change or something on the back-end is slower. There is another gas station of the same brand just 3 miles away and it is still running the old version of the pump software, which is fast and user friendly. In fact, it makes me want to drive that extra bit in order to not have to put up with the slow software.

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