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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

pcworld.com

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#781

Post by gregates »

afavour wrote: post #617
MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…

I love that I work at a place (Row Zero) where caring about performance is baked into the culture, and I can spend days fixing weird perf edge cases our users discover without management asking why I'm wasting my time. And it's office software, no less!

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#782

Post by calf »

nikanj wrote: post #748
_ah wrote: post #746

Wow, this takes me back. I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster. That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstractio…

And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V

Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#783

Post by looperhacks »

troad wrote: post #443
dijit wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?

Not all cheating sends "bad data" to the server. Cheats like wallhacks or aimbots are purely clientside and can't be detected on the server

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#784

Post by bicolao »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #740
dimgl wrote: post #384

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads…

stupid question: why haven't we even heard of an attempt to say rewrite office from scratch or how about even bigger like write windows from scratch for the next version and scrap all the 20 yr old+ workarounds hardcoded into it

because it's not worth the risk of breaking plenty applications out there (or in the case of office, documents). I have heard stories of MS making changes to keep older apps working. Imagine carrying all that to a new rewrite.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#785

Post by majkinetor »

nikanj wrote: post #748
_ah wrote: post #746

Wow, this takes me back. I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster. That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstractio…

And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V

I guess he was thinking that u might not need Saturn V. If u later decide based on more info that u need it, drop the old work and make perfy version from 0. I yhink that is reasonable given how much more work and resources it requires

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#787

Post by autoexec »

naikrovek wrote: post #690
trealira wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software bec…

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of…

> languages like javascript and python remove you so much from the CPU and the cache that even if you were thinking of those things, you can't do anything about it.

Even operating systems don't get direct access to the hardware these days. Instead a bunch of SoC middlemen handle everything however they like.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#788

Post by noname120 »

jacurtis wrote: post #675

I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender. Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I bo…

Outlook and the office suite hardly ever crash on my up-to-date MacBook Pro M2 with no company MDM crapware. Are you sure it's not your company's bs that causes the crashes?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#789

Post by ppenenko »

naikrovek wrote: post #690
trealira wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software bec…

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of…

I commiserate with your frustration with developers writing things suboptimally all too often. However, I disagree with the assumption that it's a JS/Python vs C issue.

Example: when VS Code came out, it was much, much faster, more responsive and stable than Visual Studio at the time. Despite being based on Electron, it apparently was much better on architecture, algorithms and multithreading than VS with its C++ and .NET legacy codebase. That really impressed me, as a C++ programmer.

Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#790

Post by [deleted] »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #718
dimgl wrote: post #384

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads…

> Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox a…

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