When I read the headline I thought this was going to be something like slow food or the slow movement in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture) and arguing for software to be slower.
I'm glad I was wrong.
Slow Software
41–50 of 272 posts
Re: Slow Software
#42I seriously doubt the vast majority of the population cares. I mean, I do. I hate websites that take many seconds to completely load when I know they could take less than 1 second without the bloat. Hardcore desktop gamers and developers usually are also very performance conscious but that is minority. Sites keep piling hits while adding bloat, and it's totally counterintuitive. Why?
I care. One of my worst slow system experiences is my "new" Xfinity X1 "Entertainment System." Latency to remote control button press is on the order of a second or more. Worse than that, it will put prompts up on screen and not be ready for the input. For example, when I finish watching a recorded program it puts op a "Delete" prompt. If O press the OK button when this prompt appears, nothing happens. I have to wait a second or two and press the OK button again. When I open the list of recorded programs it can take from 2-4 (or more) seconds to display anything. The delays are long enough that I am often left wondering if it registered a button press or if I need to press again. I have to wait at a minimum 4-5 seconds to see if the system is catching up or if I need to repeat an action.
It's a constant irritation when using the system.
It baffles me that their flagship product is so non-performant. I guess that when you have no real competition there is no motivation to produce a better system.
Re: Slow Software
#43I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…
I'm on 4gb ram with a spinning hard drive and I develop on it. I'd like something a bit faster but it's not a huge deal to use visual studio code, webpack etc.
Re: Slow Software
#44I 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 less than half a second (e.g. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...)
Re: Slow Software
#45I seriously doubt the vast majority of the population cares. I mean, I do. I hate websites that take many seconds to completely load when I know they could take less than 1 second without the bloat. Hardcore desktop gamers and developers usually are also very performance conscious but that is minority. Sites keep piling hits while adding bloat, and it's totally counterintuitive. Why?
I care. One of my worst slow system experiences is my "new" Xfinity X1 "Entertainment System." Latency to remote control button press is on the order of a second or more. Worse than that, it will put prompts up on screen and not be ready for the input. For example, when I finish watching a recorded program it puts op a "Delete" prompt. If O press the OK button when this prompt appears, nothing happens. I have to wait…
Comcast dvrs are indeed terrible. I'd at least go tivo, but these days if you have a computer hooked up to your tv and a nice wireless keyboard, you can run youtube tv and it is _much much better_.
Re: Slow Software
#46I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…
If I want something to run fast I do all of the testing on ancient hardware or artificially constrained VMs.
Re: Slow Software
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
‘judder’ refers to dropped frames in a fixed-frame-rate application, frames that are not dropped but are rendered too late, or, more generally, variance in frame rate of a program that should be smoothly animating.
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.
[deleted]
Re: Slow Software
#48My least favorite type of latency is when you start typing and the application takes at least 1 - 2 seconds to catch up with you. This still happen to me often enough to be a normal occurrence on both my desktop computer and phone.
I work with Embarcadero Rapid SQL and I got used to these hiccups already, sometimes up to 10 seconds delay. I don't want to start on how crappy software is in terms of user experience, but I see people getting their jobs done with it and not complaining just one bit. Should I think I got spoiled with snappy fast barebones editors? I'm getting better at ignoring the ugliness and I feel it's a good exercise of willpower.
Re: Slow Software
#49My least favorite type of latency is when you start typing and the application takes at least 1 - 2 seconds to catch up with you. This still happen to me often enough to be a normal occurrence on both my desktop computer and phone.
this is unfortunately my almost daily experience using slack...
Re: Slow Software
#50I seriously doubt the vast majority of the population cares. I mean, I do. I hate websites that take many seconds to completely load when I know they could take less than 1 second without the bloat. Hardcore desktop gamers and developers usually are also very performance conscious but that is minority. Sites keep piling hits while adding bloat, and it's totally counterintuitive. Why?
I think you're largely referring to sites that work based on their content, and not their workflow. i.e. site you interact with to consume content. Most of those sites are "free". People are willing to wait for things that they want to consume and are available for free, up to some limit. If we're talking about websites that offer some sort of utility -- i.e. it does something for you and you need to interact with it…
> People are willing to wait for things that they want to consume and are available for free, up to some limit.
Right, they are going to wait 4-6 seconds and then maybe go back if the page doesn't load.
But that's an insane amount of time which is why I think most people don't really care about bloat until they think "hey this isn't working".
But I concede that you have a point with the tools vs websites to consume information. There is no difference for me personally, loading and reading a website is part of using it.