Google's UI's in general are shockingly slow. I don't understand why my Google Drive and Gmail have input lag and choppy animations on my 5 year old xps13, it's not that hard to make navigating a filesystem or list of emails fast. Actually I do understand, it's because they want everything they build to be made in a massive javascript framework with shared components, which looks nice but runs like garbage on anything not modern.
Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
51–60 of 405 posts
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#52Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#53The medium is the message. In some domains, slow and clunky feels like gravitas and reliability. Enterprise software. Enterprise recruiting software. AWS has a pretty slow, and clunky dashboard. AdSense is clunky. A lot of the biggest companies' flagship apps have a very bland "bureaucratic" look and feel. You may find it hard to believe, but Zuck wanted facebook to look like a government database for a long time, where you type in someone's name and see details about them. Engineers will probably scoff at these notions, because it seems to suggest that underlying their "real" engineering concerns, are implicit aesthetics they would neither say they agree with nor be aware of, but it's real. If you're deep in the medium, maybe you don't even see it as a medium anymore, and you don't realize its quirks.
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#54The gcloud command line is also abysmally slow.
The memory usage of the webpage often exceeds 1GiB.
But otherwise the platform is good. So I suffer through.
But I agree it’s annoying.
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer you should 1) have the fastest possible code / test cycle - i.e. it's worth overpaying for faster machines 2) treat performance as a feature and formally measure it across configurations
I've worked for many companies, small and large, corporate and startups. None of them had performance as a priority, or even considered at the product level. Any minimal performance optimization or win we had was because a developer cared enough for it.... but maybe I'm the only one and just had bad luck with the product managers/owners I had.
In my experience performance became a secondary (not primary!) priority once big customers began to threaten to not renew their contracts
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#56User 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.
Found the google interview reject.
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer you should 1) have the fastest possible code / test cycle - i.e. it's worth overpaying for faster machines 2) treat performance as a feature and formally measure it across configurations
I've worked for many companies, small and large, corporate and startups. None of them had performance as a priority, or even considered at the product level. Any minimal performance optimization or win we had was because a developer cared enough for it.... but maybe I'm the only one and just had bad luck with the product managers/owners I had.
We definitely promote performance as a primary (and a half) concern. Mainly because the alternative is throwing more money at servers and/or dealing with disgruntled customers. I wish we dedicated more resources to it but we also don't ignore it.
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#58My pet peeve is that a lot of the GCP console doesn't even seem to work in Firefox. For example:
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#59User 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…
I don't think it is just that. Google is just shockingly bad at web frontend. All their properties are terrible, except maybe Youtube which I find quite agreeable. For example I just made a search on google.com, the most popular website in the world, and it can't even fit the content into this reasonably sized window [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png
Try not using an esoteric desktop environment and web browser.
Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?
#60User 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…
I suspect there's something in that comment on above-average network connections - the people working on Google Cloud's UI are going to be doing so from Google networks, or over a Google VPN, which means they'll be seeing much lower latency to your average person who has to be bounced around their ISP network and then across a couple of peering providers before getting there.
This stuff is dead slow even on a fast machine with fast connections.
The problem isn't people don't know. The problem is the software is drowning in layers of complexity and abstraction, and it's all in JavaScript not an optimized native language.