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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?

#251

Post by snovv_crash »

chrisandchris wrote: post #244
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.

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.

At least the new JIRA workflows are faster than the old one...

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#252

Post by lqet »

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…

This is especially frustrating if you consider that Google's own benchmark tool Lighthouse constantly gives you MOTDs like "Company X increased their revenue Y dollars per 100 ms page load speedup."

I am on mobile; what are the Lighthouse scores for Google's own products?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#253

Post by mszcz »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #191
woah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this some kind of dig against the web? I prefer native myself, but obviously there are huge numbers of faster websites out there. The answer is that Google’s frameworks suck, and have for many years. I can’t comment on whether things are equally a mess in their proprietary code, but I don’t see any reason to think they’re not. This is a problem with Google, and their slide into mediocrity.

I love the web from the bottom of my heart. I love Javascript, I love Typescript, I love Angular. Develop once, run everywhere, no client side updating required. I love rest(ful) APIs. I consider working with Angular a joy. I am serious here.

Kinda funny that after all you said you felt the need to add a I am serious here ;)

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#254

Post by trhway »

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!"

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

that is how enterprise employers treat their employees. The time is wasted everywhere. Slow Google UI is just a one item in the long list, so no one of those enterprise customers would give Google a headache over it.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#255

Post by datavirtue »

_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…

Thirty years ago grandpa always said I should dev on the slowest machine we have.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#256

Post by JeremyBanks »

landerwust wrote: post #199
pradn wrote: post #164

Googler who doesn't work in front end here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt: 1) A "footsoldier" dev has no choice in frameworks, and heavy frameworks with heavy reusable components are the norm. Frameworks are used to improve dev velocity and ensure consistency among the 100 teams that contribute to the web UI. 2) Devs care about performance but might not have time to do much about it given competing prioriti…

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

It was infinitely ahead of its time when it was new... and then it was abandoned until it was miles behind the competition.

It's the Google Way.

(But truly, the headcount on Google's internal web tooling compared with the size of the organization is laughable. I watched lots of devs burn out trying to improve internal tooling, then quit, because the organization doesn't value it.)

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#257

Post by tracker1 »

dmitriid wrote: post #196
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…

> enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years. Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place. Instead, they have been redesigning the logs inte…

I don't entirely agree... Material Design is pretty great imho and I like most of their UI choices (for applications that seem to sometimes get priority).

I think what this comes down to, is that their best technical minded developers are busy working on tooling, platforms, systems or other lower-level development. Their best design focused developers on public facing applications. This tends to leave the most junior of developers working on internally facing developer UIs. The payloads themselves are irresponsibly large on this application to say the least, and the ability/skill and understanding needed to make it better are probably not within the team(s) working on this UI to begin with.

Personally, I absolutely hate Angular and it's ironic that Angular's chosen primary UI toolkit @angular/material gets roughly half the downloads of the third party material-ui for react. Not even counting boostrap adapters.

Most web applications can easily be done in JS with an initial JS payload of ~500k-1mb (download size, compressed), with code splitting can have payloads for different areas/components come up as needed. Charts is probably the biggest beast that is practically impossible to tame, there have been a few times that I just generate the SVG directly in a React component to save the overhead of using a charting library, which is surprisingly easy to do.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#258

Post by jeffbee »

woah wrote: post #156
dsign wrote: post #5

That's what happens when you employ over-enthusiastic developers obsessed with their Javascript-framework-legacy. Things worked fast when HTML was the UI, and the logic was in the server.

Facebook also makes heavy use of frontend frameworks but all their stuff is fast because they are competent at it.

I just measured an uncached page load of facebook.com and it takes 3.5s which isn't stellar.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#259

Post by tracker1 »

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…

I happen to like MS Teams a lot... was very happy to see Linux getting proper support earlier this year, similar for o365. If you run a company with more than a handful of users, worth the price of entry imo.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#260

Post by musha68k »

levosmetalo wrote: post #79
gravypod wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...).

> Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. Yep, already covered that under incompetence and cluelessness. > GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one o…

They had some big outages over the last year. I’m therefore still skeptical to bet on them from a “backend” operations reliability standpoint also. To be fair I’m not sure they are doing worse than AWS though when looking into details. I’m thinking recent AWS Kinesis us-east issue - move fast and break things? Maybe uptime is more important than a gazillion new “feature” services. I also prefer good terraform provider stewardship over any “fancy” new cloudformation CDK or “beautiful” GUI actually. It’s complicated.
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