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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?

#301

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

levosmetalo wrote: post #23
_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…

Why is everyone assuming that just because someone works for Google has to be competent? Solving algorithmic puzzles is not an indicator or actual technical skills. To me, it looks like a work of incompetent developers led by incompetent technical managers upon requirements of clueless and ignorant product managers.

Because it is both kind and safe to be charitable, and many problems can be explained without having to assume idiot developers.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#302

Post by branko_d »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

> Google is shipping its org chart

This is basically the definition of Conway's Law.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#303

Post by jeremycarter »

landerwust wrote: post #43

Yikes, didn't realize they had the indecency to drink their own kool-aid. Angular, really? No wonder! Come to think of it, it's maybe been around a year since I last saw one of those tell-tale "page finishes loading to a blank page for 20 seconds before finally rendering" Angular sites

This comment is ignorance at it's finest.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#304

Post by zerocrates »

ubercore wrote: post #299
v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.

One pet peeve I have is getting to prime video. They own primevideo.com, but it just tells you to watch on Amazon. It's also the first result when you search (on google) for amazon prime video. There's no direct url to get it (afaik).

amazon.com/primevideo and amazon.com/video both go there.

The situation with primevideo.com is strange, but it seems to have something to do with non-US territories?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#306

Post by theptip »

polytely wrote: post #274
solarkraft wrote: post #131

Many people here seem to think this is due to incompetence, I don't. It's due to a lack of focus on speed as an indicator of quality. I think Google devs are perfectly capable of building fast frontends, maybe they even want to, but if they're not rewarded for it (but are rewarded for "getting things done") they won't. It's management's fault.

But that is just managerial incompetence and the inability of the devs in question to push back against that managerial incompetence.

> that is just managerial incompetence

Isn't this making a bit of a leap? Management could be correctly measuring that keeping load times below 1s will cost them $10m/year and yield them $1m/year in increased revenue (made up numbers for the sake of example, of course), i.e. making improvements would have negative ROI.

I'd love for the console to be faster, but it's already way better than AWS (I haven't tried Azure so can't comment there) so I'm not sure I'd want to increase my cloud spend just to get better load times.

There's a general cognitive bias on HN where performance is assumed to be a feature that your product _must_ have, because we bias heavily towards individuals that appreciate good craftsmanship in our tools. I like well-crafted tools too, but it's important to keep in mind that the ROI on polishing a tool isn't always there, and that's one of the realities of life in a world of scarcity with limited resources to be allocated.

This is just speculation of course, it could well be that GCP's management is incompetent, and they haven't measured the dollar-per-unit-performance tradeoff; my point is that I don't think you've substantiated the claims of incompetence, rather you've assumed that the ROI on performance improvements must be positive. I know Google has done such experiments on the loading time for search results, I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows the details about whether this has been done in GCP.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#307

Post by daxfohl »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

> And the product as a whole is chasing feature parity, not speed of UI.

I thought google was actively avoiding parity-chasing, opting to "do their own thing, which will be better" instead. Or have I just been drinking the kool-aid?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#308

Post by gnopgnip »

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.

People who use this product largely don't interact with the web ui, a lot of things are only done occasionally. And the people that use it frequently won't use the web ui, command line tools or a third party program that abstracts that away is more likely.

Also the AWS web ui has a lot of the same problems, so switching vendors wouldn't just fix the problem

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#309

Post by phendrenad2 »

I keep waiting for some company to remember how fast desktop apps are and wake us all from our collective webapp delusion. I imagine native Swift on MacOS and C# on Windows desktop GUI frontends for Google Cloud wouldn't be hard to build or maintain. How often does Google Cloud change their webapp's UI?

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#310

Post by pjmlp »

LockAndLol wrote: post #181
pjmlp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding for Android has taught me that is definitely not the case. They managed to make a mess worse than JEE, the native layer took 10 years to finally use Android Modules, they keep fixing the header files, still don't have proper C++ bindings and force everyone to write JNI boilerplate by hand.

The Android base wasn't written by Google. Google bought the company that made Android 2 years after it was written. That's a lot of time to create a base system and a lot of time to create cruft. By now, it's too late to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, hence a new OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

That is no excuse. They had 10 years to fix it, and many issues steem from Google's HR to promote doing shinny toys instead of fixing broken stuff.
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