4 ms·

In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least reduce

In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least reduce the overhead of orphaned projects out there.

peterwwillis 8y ago
There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less infrequently used resources, the applications will use up resources more frequently in an inefficient way. Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.
- kbar13 8y ago
  if you have the resources use them? 15 years ago your browser had a small fraction of the features a modern browser provides. this argument is tiring.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - noxToken 8y ago
    Which is the problem. Everyone knows that I have resources, so everyone wants to use them by packing in every feature without any consideration for how much memory it uses. It's fine if I only wanted to run a browser or only wanted to run an IDE. It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.
- hinkley 8y ago
  More generally: when you detach the consequences from the causes, everybody misbehaves. (This is, btw, one of the cornerstones of CI/CD. Show people the consequences immediately and their behavior will shift. I've seen this firsthand a number of times.)
- bulatb 8y ago
  Today it's possible to buy a laser-guided sleep-o-matic superbed that walks your dog and cures your back pain. You can also buy a basic bed that's pretty nice and reasonably cheap. 15 years ago, you might have had a high-tech bed that didn't leave you sore in the morning. 1,500 years ago you had a bed of straw with fleas and bedbugs, but at least you had a place to sleep. 150,000 years you slept in furs on dirt by the fire, breathing smoke and aggravating your sciatica. Your bed was basically free, but since your livelihood depended on your full mobility, sleeping there was slowly killing you. All these beds provided the feature of "sleep." So why would anybody need a sleep-o-matic, a bed worth more in 150,000 BC dollars than the yearly economic output of your continent? Why should we accept the massive waste of resources it represents?
  - bulatb 8y ago
    (Because the sleep-o-matic is better. Those resources are used, not wasted.)
- sethrin 8y ago
  Fifteen years ago, AJAX did not exist. Fifteen years before that our computers had VGA screens and megabytes of RAM. Yours is an oft-heard complaint in many quarters, but with respect, I have trouble taking it as indicative of anything other than the bitterness of age. Yes, the new technology is bloated and wasteful. As far as I am aware, this has been a fact of new technology for some time. Efficiency is one of the least important factors in software development.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate. You probably weren't; perceptions of speed are often based on expectations set by experience, and your expectations were probably a lot lower then. If you actually could go back and browse the web of 15 years ago and the sites you could then, you would be disappointed, but the speed then was similar scaled to the expectations you had then as the speed now is scaled to your current t expectations. So your perception of the speed is similar.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I know I could have four browser windows open with 20 tabs each, to a random selection of web pages. If I try to do that today on a laptop with 2GB RAM on a moden browser, it dies from running out of memory. I tried using an older browser, but it won't render modern pages and uses legacy crypto. So I know for a fact that modern browsers simply can't work on older hardware, whereas the older browsers used to work, but are no longer compatible with modern websites.
    - slededit 8y ago
      Firefox didn't even have tabbed browsing in 2003 and everyone else was in the IE6 winter. FF was only 1 year old at this point. Were you using another browser?
      - peterwwillis 8y ago
        Firefox didn't exist in 2003, it was released in November 2004. Before then, the name of the browser was Phoenix. It had tabs since version 0.1, released in September 2002. Later it was renamed Firebird and then Firefox. Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
        slededit 8y ago
        It existed but was still under development and not enabled by default. E.g. there was no graceful handling of tab overflows https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Desi...

peterwwillis 8y ago

There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less infrequently used resources, the applications will use up resources more frequently in an inefficient way. Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.

kbar13 8y ago
if you have the resources use them? 15 years ago your browser had a small fraction of the features a modern browser provides. this argument is tiring.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- noxToken 8y ago
  Which is the problem. Everyone knows that I have resources, so everyone wants to use them by packing in every feature without any consideration for how much memory it uses. It's fine if I only wanted to run a browser or only wanted to run an IDE. It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.
hinkley 8y ago
More generally: when you detach the consequences from the causes, everybody misbehaves. (This is, btw, one of the cornerstones of CI/CD. Show people the consequences immediately and their behavior will shift. I've seen this firsthand a number of times.)
bulatb 8y ago
Today it's possible to buy a laser-guided sleep-o-matic superbed that walks your dog and cures your back pain. You can also buy a basic bed that's pretty nice and reasonably cheap. 15 years ago, you might have had a high-tech bed that didn't leave you sore in the morning. 1,500 years ago you had a bed of straw with fleas and bedbugs, but at least you had a place to sleep. 150,000 years you slept in furs on dirt by the fire, breathing smoke and aggravating your sciatica. Your bed was basically free, but since your livelihood depended on your full mobility, sleeping there was slowly killing you. All these beds provided the feature of "sleep." So why would anybody need a sleep-o-matic, a bed worth more in 150,000 BC dollars than the yearly economic output of your continent? Why should we accept the massive waste of resources it represents?
- bulatb 8y ago
  (Because the sleep-o-matic is better. Those resources are used, not wasted.)
sethrin 8y ago
Fifteen years ago, AJAX did not exist. Fifteen years before that our computers had VGA screens and megabytes of RAM. Yours is an oft-heard complaint in many quarters, but with respect, I have trouble taking it as indicative of anything other than the bitterness of age. Yes, the new technology is bloated and wasteful. As far as I am aware, this has been a fact of new technology for some time. Efficiency is one of the least important factors in software development.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate. You probably weren't; perceptions of speed are often based on expectations set by experience, and your expectations were probably a lot lower then. If you actually could go back and browse the web of 15 years ago and the sites you could then, you would be disappointed, but the speed then was similar scaled to the expectations you had then as the speed now is scaled to your current t expectations. So your perception of the speed is similar.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I know I could have four browser windows open with 20 tabs each, to a random selection of web pages. If I try to do that today on a laptop with 2GB RAM on a moden browser, it dies from running out of memory. I tried using an older browser, but it won't render modern pages and uses legacy crypto. So I know for a fact that modern browsers simply can't work on older hardware, whereas the older browsers used to work, but are no longer compatible with modern websites.
  - slededit 8y ago
    Firefox didn't even have tabbed browsing in 2003 and everyone else was in the IE6 winter. FF was only 1 year old at this point. Were you using another browser?
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      Firefox didn't exist in 2003, it was released in November 2004. Before then, the name of the browser was Phoenix. It had tabs since version 0.1, released in September 2002. Later it was renamed Firebird and then Firefox. Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
      - slededit 8y ago
        It existed but was still under development and not enabled by default. E.g. there was no graceful handling of tab overflows https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Desi...