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

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#241

Post by syncsynchalt » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #93

blakesterz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian is one of those places that I just can't believe has gotten so widely used. Every single thing I've used that is an Atlassian product drives me nuts. I really don't understand how anyone at any point looked at Jira or Confluence or anything Atlassian puts out and said "yep, this is the best version of this thing I've seen, sign me up". I've been using JIRA for years now, and it never gets any easier or bett…

You’re probably using it wrong. Click your mouse on a non-interactive UI component and press “.” Now you can find everything you want. You’re welcome. I agree jira is terrible. Other bug trackers I’ve used are somehow worse. Does anyone have anything they can recommend with a straight face? (Github issues are missing too many features for me. Jira’s sql-style language is just too useful.)

I'm a jira power-user and your answer highlights my two main problems with it.

> Click your mouse on a non-interactive UI component

80% of the UI is interactive, but not marked as such. Have fun finding a 10px strip that won't turn into an edit workflow when clicked!

> Click your mouse on a non-interactive UI component and press “.”

Even using the keybindings (seriously everyone, hit "?" and look through them) events are lost. Want to create a subtask? It's not `.sub`, it's actually `.sub^H^Hsub^H^H^HsubTitle Of My Task`

They've done so much work to make it a quick UX but it's all for nothing when it randomly eats keystrokes and defocuses constantly. Maybe some of our add-ons are at fault, I'm interested in hearing if there are jira installs that aren't like mine.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#242

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

Rompect wrote: post #137

influx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original gmail design was so fast, beautiful and minimalistic. It had vi key bindings and was close to perfect. The new one had a bunch of useless white space and the app has a loading bar! Wtf?!

FYI you can still switch to the old design. When the fake loading screen ( https://smitop.com/post/gmail-s-fake-loading-indicator/ ) is loading, click on the bottom on "Prefer old design". Then you can set that as default. It is an absolute must for me given how fast it is.

Note that objectively speaking the basic HTML gmail is slower in every aspect, except for the initial page load. Everything but the initial page load is slower. The main web app has extensive latency-hiding features that are key to Gmail's overall performance story. The basic HTML UI has none of these features. Every action in the basic UI takes half a second or more because it's a server round trip.

Example: load the basic HTML and enter a thread then return to the thread list. Returning to the thread list takes about 1 second. In the full gmail return to thread list takes no remote time, only local event handler CPU time, it's almost instantaneous.

Example 2: Open a thread in the basic UI and use "newer" or "older" to navigate to other threads. Every click takes ~1s. In the full Gmail UI navigate to adjacent thread takes almost no time, because the app pre-loads these threads in anticipation of you visiting them.

TL;DR the basic HTML gmail is good if your device is severely resource-poor and you just need to see if you have mail. For every other purpose it's worse.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#243

Post by endymi0n » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

Playing the devil’s advocate here, I think it‘s just very hard to build a dashboard for this scale of resources, services and users that‘s all of very (!) secure, flexible (as in terms of policies) as well as fast.

Having had to use the Microsoft Admin dashboard for creating five new PowerBI users (which took me the better part of an hour), going back to Google‘s Cloud Console felt like a godsend of UX, Comfort, Sensibility and Speed.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#244

Post by chrisandchris » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:36 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.

Tell that to the guys at Atlassian, the worlds slowest web application...

The people making the decision aren‘t not often the ones who need to work with the product.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#245

Post by markdog12 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

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.

They do, well at least Chrome does: https://blog.chromium.org/2015/03/new-javascript-techniques-...

> Chrome 42 introduces an advanced technique of storing a local copy of the compiled code, so that when the user returns to the page the downloading, parsing, and compiling steps can all be skipped.

Not sure what's going on in Google Cloud UI, though. It's a dumpster fire.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#246

Post by markdog12 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #219

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.

An interesting proposal:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/binary-ast/

https://tc39.es/proposal-binary-ast/

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#247

Post by patch_cable » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

pabl0rg wrote: post #4

Meanwhile AWS uses google’s GWT to great effect

Some older services do. It isn’t the framework used by new services for their consoles.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#248

Post by bombela » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #220

EGreg wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The moment you find slack to be faster than something else. You know we have reached the absolute rock bottom.

I have to use both Slack and the Google Cloud UI at work. RIP.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#249

Post by makecheck » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

I continue to advocate for hard download limits on the browser side that can only be overridden by scary user prompts. The defaults can be slightly larger for pages classified as “apps”, or certain file formats (e.g. when a link’s purpose is to download an entire app) but generally pages should be constrained to sizes on the order of kilobytes.

As long as the floodgates can simply stay open and pages can download whatever they want, coders will remain lazy. This isn’t surprising at all.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#250

Post by riejo » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

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.

VSC dev here. Correct, perf is a priority for us and it's no black magic. A simple one is to keep your bundles small. VSC's main bundle is less than 9MB, Cloud UI seems to be 15.