41–50 of 819 posts
I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…
I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…
Nobody has created a language that is both thousands of times faster than Python and nearly as straightforward to learn and to use. The closest thing I know of might be Julia, but that has its own performance problems and is tied closely to its AI/ML niche. Even within that niche I'm certainly not going to get most data scientists to write their code in C or C++ (or heaven forbid Rust) to solve a performance impediment that they've generally been able to work around.
It's great that you've been able to switch to higher-performance languages, but not everyone can do that easily enough to make it worth doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…
Let the caches warm up a little!
This is very visible in any app that no longer maintains "local state" but instead is just a web browser to some online state (think: Electron, teams, etc). Disconnect the web or slow it down and it all goes to hell.
For instance running unoptimised code can eat a lot of energy unnecessarily, which has an impact on carbon footprint.
Do you think we are going to see regulation in this area akin to car emission bands?
Even to an extent that some algorithms would be illegal to use when there are more optimal ways to perform a task? Like using BubbleSort when QuickSort would perform much better.
I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…
Python allows one to save development time in exchange for execution time
I wonder how much power (and resulting CO2 emissions) could be saved if all code had to go through such optimization. And on a slightly ranty note, Apple's A12z and A14 are still apparently "too weak" to run multiple windows simultaneously :)
Worse CO2 emissions. You think optimizations are energy free?
Some code is compiled more often than it is run, and some code is run more often than it's compiled.
If you can spend 100k operations per compilation to save 50k operations at runtime on average... That'll probably be a net positive for chromium or glibc functions or linux syscalls, all of which end up being run by users more often than they are built by developers.
If it's 100k operations at build-time to remove 50k operations from a test function only hit by CI, then yeah, you'll be in the hole 50k operations per CI run.
All of this ignores the human cost; I don't really want to try (and fail) to approximate the CO2 emissions of converting coffee to performance optimizations.
I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…
I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not only a matter of 750ms instead of 200ms. I'm astonished every time I open some tool like Visual Studio, SAP Power Designer, or Libre Office that can stay for the most part of a minute on its loading screen. What do those tools even do for that long? They can read enough data from the disk to overflow my computer's main memory a few times during it.
Phone home. I suspect much of the lag is network latency.
At least VS is just kinda slow, maybe it's the XML parser :D
I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…
> And in the end, the code seems to run "fast enough" and nobody involved really notices that what is running in 750ms really ought to run in something more like 200us. Nobody has created a language that is both thousands of times faster than Python and nearly as straightforward to learn and to use. The closest thing I know of might be Julia, but that has its own performance problems and is tied closely to its AI/ML…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…
That's interesting, I cloned a Win10 installation on a HDD to a sata SSD a year or two back and the speed difference was considerable. Especially something like Atom that took minutes to open before was ready to go in like 10 seconds afterwards. A lot of things remained slow though.
I'm talking about Windows 10 on 4G C2Q or Phenom/Phenom II machines - they aren't fast but they're very usable with a SSD and GPU in place.