44 ms·

Slow Software

438 points by Thibaut 8y ago

gleenn 8y ago
I like how the site is an example of very fast software, such a simple design and it renders immediately; a single file load with the tiniest of javascript to make the videos work. A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred!
- merb 8y ago
  to be fair the site is a html site only and gets served via cloudflare. not a fair metric against a "dynamic" site. also most webservers/frameworks/whatever will favor throughput over latency.
  - coder543 8y ago
    Ok, what about Hacker News? But the article discusses news website like WaPo that really don't need to be very dynamic.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    This site is fast, why should I care how it got fast?
  - pdpi 8y ago
    dynamic sites are a choice, and achieving that richer level of interaction comes with its own costs. For every legitimately dynamic page out there (going all the way up to full-on applications), there’s many more that have no good reason to be anything other than static content that could be served from a cdn. Going pure html for a page that doesn’t need more is precisely the sort of design choice that goes with the mentality they’re advocating. Optimising for throughout rather than latency is, again, a design choice, and the article serves as an indictment of taking that too far.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Though, if I were to critique it, I would say that the JS was not really necessary for such a simple case for video. There's only one <source> (I guess H.264 is considered ubiquitous now) and the big central play button just gets in the way of the video (and on most platforms, the default styling of the <video> element puts a big play button over top of it anyway).
- greenyouse 8y ago
  The only nitpick I have is that the sidebar comments are built in a weird way. They're nested in the middle of the paragraphs inside small tags. It would be a little nicer if they split the sidebar text into aside tags that come after the paragraph. It's refreshing to see a site that loads quickly though. That would've been a bit hypocritical otherwise :p
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred! Nitpick: not really a full page load. The text part is 14 KiB, but once the website finished downloading the images and videos it's 14 MiB. However, because it does so via lazy loading (same for the PNGs), the text-parts are instantly rendered, and because it downloads all of the videos you have no buffering latency when clicking. So yeah, near-perfect example of how to design a website for low-latency while still maintaining rich media (the thumbnail PNGs could have been JPGs to save more data, and more importantly: lazy-load even faster).
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> Android and iOS both make substantial use of "long press" to access context menus, which require that the user wait hundreds of milliseconds in the middle of their command gestures. > A related source is delays for disambiguation. For example, on mobile Safari there's a default 350ms delay between when the user taps a link and when the browser begins fetching the new page, in order to tell the difference between a link click and a double-tap zoom. I really wish mobile devices had one or two modifier buttons on the side. That way you could have "right click", maybe even positioning a cursor without clicking, all sorts of crazy stuff, like being able to "mouse over" a link in a mobile browser.
- cronix 8y ago
  We can't do that. Buttons, and headphone jacks, are so yesterday. /s
- ggreer 8y ago
  Apple has 3D touch, where if you press firmly on the screen, the phone makes a tactile "click" and triggers a different action than normal tap. Annoyingly, Apple mapped 3D touch to a totally new set of actions instead of replacing long press.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Apple has slowly started merging the two, because it makes it easier for them to support devices with and without the feature.
- Shank 8y ago
  > I really wish mobile devices had one or two modifier buttons on the side. Look, I feel you in terms of lost functionality, but I don't when it comes to trying to explain how these systems work to my family. Android was notoriously bad because the back stack behaved totally sane to programmers, and insane to everyone else. When Android had a "menu" button on the bottom too, it was another source of confusion. "What does the menu button do?" Thinking back further, I know for a fact my mom didn't even know her phone had a trackball on it (hiya Android 2.x era), but she was mystified when I told her what it was and what it did. I'd rather someone fix the design problem of mapping taps to different things than add more buttons that are impossible to explain.
taneq 8y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again - one of the greatest boons from the new wave of VR is not the tech itself (fun though it is) but the focus on latency as a first-class metric. I've always been sensitive to microstuttering and so find it irritating when a game that's "running at 90fps" (or a document that's scrolling) still has perceptible judders.
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  is 'judder' a synonym for 'jank'?
  - beefsack 8y ago
    No, "judder" is like a shaking or vibrating, "jank" just means bad quality.
    - singlow 8y ago
      Jank has a more specialized meaning here, related to delays in UI rendering that cause frames to be dropped intermittently which reduces the smoothness of motion. Judder is a perceived vibration or motion aliasing caused by the incoherence of consecutive frames at a fixed sample rate.
  - jblow 8y ago
    ‘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.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      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 8y ago
coder543 8y ago
I 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 the embarrassment of seeing how incredibly fast JIRA is compared to their own sluggish offerings, right? I am confident that JIRA's application latency has nothing to do with Java (backend) or JavaScript's (frontend) garbage collector. Many companies just feel no impetus to write fast software, or to use commensurately powerful hardware.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  But to be fair, plain Jira can be pretty fast, it’s just when you get into an enterprise environment and people think they need 2000 different fields things fall apart.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    Why shouldn't 2000 fields be fast? Shouldn't all of what jira does boil down to straight forward SQL queries?
    - flattone 8y ago
      or even 200000 etc. I've never used but at a glance i feel like it's just a google sheets tracker with unnecessary visual stuff?
  - coder543 8y ago
    I've never seen JIRA be "pretty fast", so I can't agree. I also think "2000 different fields" is an unfair exaggeration, if we're going to focus on being fair. The 10 to 20 fields that people might use per issue should not prevent JIRA from being fast with the right architecture.
    - viraptor 8y ago
pier25 8y ago
I 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?
- guiltygatorade 8y ago
  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 often. Then its responsiveness is likely going to be a much bigger factor. If gmail loads your inboxes and emails in hundreds of milliseconds but yahoo took several seconds, and a person needs to respond to lots of emails during the day, I'm sure the person would develop a preference for the former if all other things are equal.
  - pier25 8y ago
    > 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.
- oldandtired 8y ago
  I just did a test from the main page to here. Clicking on the link to comments took about 4-5 seconds to render the comments. Doing a back then forward action in the browser appeared to be almost instantaneous (10's of milliseconds). I have noticed that many websites are being significantly slower these days. It, of course, could be due to the national monitoring scheme that is required now here in Australia. Using TOR to get access was a little slower to get access by about a second, otherwise back and forward are the same.
leowoo91 8y ago
I hope devs can fix the racing wheel latency first, so we can enjoy those racing games.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Which racing wheel have you tried? Was it implemented as a HID device (subject to the polling rate limitations described in the article) or with its own driver?
  - leowoo91 8y ago
    I didn't buy single one since I have seen many youtube videos, all seem to have latency (yep, HID device). By latency I mean, when you throw steer, you can see it reflects about 1/3 second to the gameplay. It is very hard to blame slowest part, probably the game itself, but I really wish that would be solved.
robochat 8y ago
My 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.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What’s worse is when the application drops events during that time.
  - O_H_E 8y ago
    Main offender for me is chrome, so much lost typing in new tabs and windows
- tartoran 8y ago
  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.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > Rapid SQL > 10 seconds delay Oh the irony.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > 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. Most people, including technical folks, don't complain (unless extremely agitated) because they know they can do nothing about it but accept it. Doesn't stop making them miserable, though.
- andrekandre 8y ago
  this is unfortunately my almost daily experience using slack...
voltagex_ 8y ago
I 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-aspire-3-15-6-laptop-a315-21-40al-aca3152140 https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir.... Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 8y ago
  The cheap androids aren't so shabby these days. A Moto G5 play is a quad core 1.4GHz with 2GB of ram. No speed demon, but is reasonable. $109.99 on Amazon, unlocked.
  - mbell 8y ago
    Javascript/web performance on Android is universally bad but truly awful on the low end. A Moto G5 pulls ~14 on speedometer 2.0 which puts it in line with an iPhone 5/5s (5-6 year old devices). An iPhone XS scores around 123 in this benchmark for comparison, ~9 times faster.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      I concur, having just purchased a Nokia 5 (for €105) and being surprised it felt so much slower than my iPhone SE. I guess it's a sign that speed/$ is flattening out. The good part about it is devices will stay competitive longer.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  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.
daxfohl 8y ago
At the app level, I'd say it's about responsiveness not latency. Instagram had a post a while back about how they cheat a bit to make their app feel responsive even if actual latency was high. From this perspective one could say this article puts too much focus into the raw numbers, how many ms to a response. As techies, we like that: cheating is cheating. Numbers are important. But really we need to look harder, how can we make users perceive that things are better than the raw numbers.
microcolonel 8y ago
On the web, a lot of time is simply wasted by the browser before it even starts doing anything specific to your page (including the initial DNS and HTTP requests).
jumarm 8y ago
Further reading from Dan Luu, who wrote about this as well. [0] He goes into why the Apple 2e is so quick, the iOS Rendering pipeline, and general complexity of computing input. I find it really interesting that latency is so high on a lot of devices in 2018. 0. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ (2017)
gok 8y ago
The "user-hostile" section is kind of silly. Poor/lazy coding is also user-hostile. Requiring 20 megabytes of JavaScript frameworks because you're too lazy to figure out how to solve your feature requirements is user hostile. Maybe call that other stuff "monetization"
jccalhoun 8y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture) and arguing for software to be slower. I'm glad I was wrong.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  My understanding of Slow Food is that it isn't necessarily about "slowness" so to speak. More about keeping things close to nature and not interfering with them / overprocessing too much. Something similar would make sense for software (e.g. using lower level languages, less extraneous JS on websites etc)
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    turn on, tune in, NOP out
turrini 8y ago
Somebody once posted a well known news website with an alternate link that loaded instantly. Anyone remember this? I don't remember if it was WSJ, or NYT or something else.
- saratogacx 8y ago
  Likely not what you had in mind but news.yahoo.com is amazingly quick to load for me.
- Zarel 8y ago
  In theory, AMP pages should all load instantly, and most news websites have AMP pages. A lot of HNers hate AMP for other reasons, though; I think mostly Google's insistence on using their CDN for it, and for whitelisting mostly their own scripts for use in AMP.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > In theory, AMP pages should all load instantly In practice, AMP pages take a minimum of 5-10 seconds to load for me. Maybe Google is punishing me for my uBlock/uMatrix/Pi-Hole setup.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    AMP loads "instantly" because Chrome preloads it, not because they're very fast. A simple page like [1] loads over a dozen JS files (including stuff like "amp-analytics"), which expand to over 1MB of code that has to be parsed. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-44802666 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-44802666
    - Zarel 8y ago
      Fair, but keep in mind that AMP loads scripts async, so the page is finished loading and usable well before stuff like amp-analytics is done being downloaded.
- shakna 8y ago
  A couple news sites have 'text-based' versions. Became popular as a way to give people in disaster areas with spotty signal a chance to find things out. These are some I found: [0] https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en [1] http://thin.npr.org/ http://thin.npr.org/
throwaway286 8y ago
I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without anti-virus.
- silviogutierrez 8y ago
  I'm currently picking the OS stack for all machines at my company. All guidance, even people I respect, point towards antivirus protection. Yet I lean towards nixing that. I know it's hugely ineffective. In fact, it opens up holes of its own[1]. And yet... it's like scaffolding in NYC[2]. Absolutely useless[3]. But if you are all for removing it, and a brick falls and hurts someone, heads will roll. Quite a quandary I - and other C-levels - face. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089872/security/security-vulnerabilities-in-symantec-and-norton-as-bad-as-it-gets-warns-researcher.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089872/security/secur... [2] Another contrarian passion of mine. [3] Bricks do fall and hurt people. But no more than scaffolding itself falls with the same effect.
  - coder543 8y ago
    Microsoft Defender typically doesn't hurt performance or security much. The alternative is to run Mac or Linux stacks instead of a Windows stack, of course.
    - godDLL 8y ago
      While running a Linux stack may still work, your Mac info is outdated by three years, at least. Macs have entered the zoo in 2015.
      - coder543 8y ago
        For practical purposes, that's not true. Macs do not allow running unsigned software by default, and no one runs antivirus on Mac, ever. So even if they were commonly being infected, which they aren't, the person above would have organizational indemnity if someone were infected because they're following industry best practices by not running antivirus on Mac. If you want, you can further restrict Macs to only App Store software, which is heavily sandboxed. Then you can go even further by not allowing the individual users to install software on their own, if you really want to be draconian about it. Unless someone is being individually targeted, running very outdated software, or is intentionally trying to get themselves infected, it will not happen. Even if all three conditions are true, it's still very unlikely. Anyone who says otherwise is just fear mongering. That same level of fear mongering could point to the dozens of pieces of malware that have been released for Linux. I say this as someone who uses a Linux laptop for work and a Windows desktop at home. I don't have a dog in this fight. I do, however, try to stay very informed about the state of software security.
RemarkableMan 8y ago
You will never massage and cram all the remote cruft efficiently enough to get back the responsiveness of an Apple II. Today’s software is turtles all the way down from the library to the sub-library to the JIT to the application and OS and hardware and they each need 5-25 milliseconds to even wake up. That’s before you even hit the network. Things don’t get bad, they get worse.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > Today’s software is turtles all the way down from the library to the sub-library to the JIT to the application and OS and hardware and they each need 5-25 milliseconds to even wake up. Where do you get these numbers? I have programs that run from start to finish in 5 ms, including tons of OS syscalls. I think many of us forgot how efficient OSes are because of the shitshow that app developers put on top.
  - zimpenfish 8y ago
    I have a Go program that parses command line arguments, loads and parses a text file, then interprets that code on a faux-CPU. Total time 24ms start to finish for 107 faux-CPU steps (sorting 12 numbers of bunches of 3) according to `time`.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Mine is also a Go program that reads several files and does some basic computations on top of it. I wrote about the `time` measurements here: https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html
dorukane 8y ago
While comparing Samsung and Apple mobile device latencies the article gives these examples: Tapping latency examples (Videos slowed 16x): - Opening a settings tab on an iPhone 6s with ~90ms of latency. - Toggling a setting a Samsung S3 with ~330ms of latency. I agree latency is evil, I hated Android a while ago because of this. Apple always felt really fast compared to other OS. BUT it seems normal that toggling a setting proceeds a bit slower than just opening a tab no? It's like it's just a bad example.
- keldaris 8y ago
  Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? I still use an ancient OnePlusX that I got when it came out and I've disabled all UI animations, toggling most settings (with legitimate exceptions like activating the wifi hotspot feature) feels almost instant, certainly nothing close to 300 ms. Admittedly, I haven't used any iPhone in many years, so I can't really compare.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    > Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? Agreed, and as the recent example with the iPhone calculator proved, Apple aren't exactly immune to this either.
    - keldaris 8y ago
      Can you just disable animations on Apple devices the way you can on Android?
      - gitgud 8y ago
        Yes, I think low power mode disables almost all animations on apple
        keldaris 8y ago
        Wouldn't that also disable other features as well (push notifications, maybe?)? Animations are something I disable permanently just to have a better user experience, I wouldn't like to sacrifice anything else.
phtrivier 8y ago
> We hope this material is helpful for you as you work on your own software. Sadly, as interesting as the material in the article is (great to learn about the measured latencies of the hardware part), I fail to see much that is "actionnable" for a run-of-the-mill software developper. It seems the only advice is "don't download ad / tracking / social media - related stuff", but even that is not exactly in the developpers circle of influence. Who's going to make google analytics smaller to download ? (except, well, google ?) Is any developper really in the position to say "great news, our pages now load xxx ms faster !! However, you won't be able to compute your KPIs for this semester, is that a problem ?") Also, is "using a language without GC" accessible today for a web frontend developper ? (through some rust / wasm / whatever magic ?)
- icebraining 8y ago
  The author doesn't say you should use a language without GC, but minimize its effects. There are techniques to avoid GC churn by reducing allocations and the subsequent cleanups.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    I heard an anecdote about how Minecraft got much slower when Notch (the original developer) turned it over to a team of employees. The new team did some refactoring, e.g. instead of calling functions like doWork(int x, int y, int z) they refactored that into doWork(Coordinate c) and that's when Minecraft started eating RAM like some sort of delicious candy, because now each time you deal with a new Coordinate, it's one more object to garbage-collect. The old method may not have been particularly pretty, but plain ints are allocated on the stack and thus reduce GC pressure. (BTW, can anyone confirm or deny that anecdote?)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dagw 8y ago
      I don't know about that particular anecdote, but the gist sounds very reasonable. I've seen/solved the exact same general thing in python on more than one occasion.
AnonC 8y ago
I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this usage is across many processes (whose names I don’t understand), not just McAfee. Since it’s a work image of Windows, it has policies set to prevent me from changing many things. Where do I even start troubleshooting this issue and finding the culprits? Is it just a CPU usage issue and/or some kind of I/O issue? I haven’t yet tried using something like Process Explorer (from the sysinternals tools) to get a clearer idea of what’s happening (though I’m not sure if that’d help). I’m thinking of putting Linux on it as an alternative. Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.
- raptorfactor 8y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/
- jack_pp 8y ago
  You could try swapping the ssd with a new one with a fresh install of windows or even try dual booting a fresh install of windows to see if it's a software issue after all.
- proxygeek 8y ago
  In my experience on a similar configuration, most of the times such aliens is because of i/o bottleneck. Antivirus, Windows app optimisations, and device manufacturers' softwares running at predefined schedules, choking the disk might be a problem. You frontotemporal should check the process explorer next time you gave the issue. In the meantime, may be check the task scheduler to see if some heavy read write tasks are scheduled
- hugg 8y ago
  McAfee intercepts every IO read/write afaik, which makes it horribly slow
stirner 8y ago
> When dragging items on the screen, for example, users perceive latencies as low as ~2ms This seems doubtful, given that even a state-of-the-art 240Hz screen only refreshes every 4.16ms. I guess they could compare dragging on a screen to dragging a physical object, but that would still be comparing 4.16+ms latency to 0ms latency, which doesn't explain the 2ms figure.
- alimbada 8y ago
  > This seems doubtful Ever tried playing a fast paced game with VSync turned on?
  - stirner 8y ago
    True, the next frame can start getting drawn before the last one, but every desktop compositor I know of uses vsync.
- jerrre 8y ago
  you could say with a 4.16ms refresh rate it takes on average ~2ms until the next frame?
okaleniuk 8y ago
Well, that's all good but it doesn't explain how did we get there. I think, Moore's law resulted in a resource curse for PC and mobile. Unlike with the shared computers from the past and cloud services from now, you pay not for the resources you use, but for the resources you own. And under the Moore's law they grew exponentially for quite a while, so the software simply followed the trend growing exponentially in overheads, too. Technical reasons are probably secondary, since we do still have real-time computing, and high-performance computations in their own respected niches. It's not that all software is inherently bad, it really depends on what it is for. I believe, the socio-economical reasons of the current state of software are most interesting and the least researched.
wink 8y ago
Only since I work fulltime with gcc hogging all my CPUs and most of my RAM for up to 10 minutes at a time and also slowing down the computer I fully appreciate having worked in dynamic languages for many years. Yes, that problem might be solvable with a beefy build box.
- kpmah 8y ago
  The difference is interpreted vs compiled, not dynamic vs typed. You can use a C interpreter to instantly run C code without compilation.
  - wink 8y ago
    Of course you're right but it's equally often used for interpreted scripting languages. And I don't like the term scripting languages. Apparently naming is hard, who knew.
dandare 8y ago
Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prioritized above everything else?? iOS got this right. Microsoft Outlook on Mac: it can teak easily 2000ms to close(!) a window, are you kidding me? My new 2018 Touchbar Mac does not "feel" any faster than my old 2013 retina Mac, while the paper specs and benchmarks show at least 100% increase in computational power. They can both equally easily choke down on some unwanted Skype update or stupid WebEx video stream (yes, I work in corporate).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lostgame 8y ago
  I also work in corporate - my 2017 Touchbar feels insanely slower than my partner's 2013, or sometimes even my late 2011. Not to mention the awful keyboard and non-upgradable parts. Outlook is a nightmare - heck, the Office suite has been awful essentially since it's rewrite from being PPC-only for 2008. Not only did we have to wait way too long for a native Intel version / Universal Binary - but when it arrived, it was slow and clunky on both pieces of hardware. But worse than office - our entire team is now being migrated to cloud-based email that virtualizes itself in an IE window, and responds to clicks and scrolls about 40% of the time. It looks awful, it performs awful, I've never experienced quite a terrible piece of software. Weird, virtualized, Office 365 - unless you're on Windows, I couldn't imagine this working for you.
- fredley 8y ago
  Office on Mac is garbage - I had someone told me that it remains single-threaded on Mac which would explain this. I find my Pixel (v1) surprisingly fast given its age and have no plans to replace it currently, although the share menu slowness is weird. It happens any time the device has to enumerate the list of installed apps—like loading the apps page in settings—, which bizarrely it doesn't seem to cache.
reallydontask 8y ago
Link is blocked at work by McAfee Web gateway Url category is pornography
agumonkey 8y ago
there's slow as laggy and slow tempo I remember how I loved my slow hp48, the input buffer was still listening and I could easily think and keep typing operations while the screen was busy, never felt "slow"
jancsika 8y ago
Why aren't ads a data point in the infographic? Ads are a necessary component of the web atm. They typically insert a delay between the user's action (clicking a button, scanning paragraphs of text with one's eyes) and the desired behavior (watching a video, comprehending which text is the article vs. advertising pictures and/or text). So a Youtube app running on Fuschia could become a poster child for "anti slow software" based on the author's guidelines. Yet this would only deliver the user more quickly to the problem of ad latency-- a problem which is orders of magnitude worse UX than the problems listed in the article. It seems like inside baseball to make ad latency an externality to the core problems of slow software.
carapace 8y ago
I recently switched to an OpendBSD machine with no mouse. I have a large screen and use tmux-- no X windows --and a clicky gamer's keyboard. It's soooo nice. The only downside so far is that about ~%60 of the WWW sucks through Lynx... I have a separate machine on my desk that's basically a Firefox and VSCode kiosk now. But I've gotten a dead-tree hardcopy book on Vim...
thinclientwoe 8y ago
I spent a decade working in engineering at Intel. Basically all design work (as of 2016, and for 10+ years prior) is done over VNC to Linux servers in data centers. The experience was barely tolerable over 100mbit Ethernet to an on-site data center, and anything less was fairly abominable for just about anything other than working in a black and white terminal. The majority of the work is fairly graphical and most engineers rarely have the luxury of connecting to an on site data center. Over the years the situation both improved and worsened: Pluses: - circa 2010 some of us were lucky enough to get gigabit Ethernet connected to our desk. - circa 2010-2015 there were improvements to the VNC protocol like JPG and Zlib compression that helped a lot with bandwidth constrained situations (nearly all) - circa 2014 a lot of us got 802.11ac capable office APs and laptops, often pushing 300+ mbps reliably. Minuses: - The company shut down a bunch of datacenters and setup “hub” sites. Making most of us work over high latency WAN links even in the office. - More and more work seemed to get organized across sites, making many of us remote to far-off datacenters even if we were local to a hub. No one in engineering management or IT seemed to take the problem seriously. No wonder the company has floundered so much. To me an unresponsive interface completely spoils flow and dramatically reduces my productivity.
jodrellblank 8y ago
Related, dadgum.com's article "How much processing power does it take to be fast?" commenting on an arcade machine playing Defender with very low latency 30-40 years ago - https://prog21.dadgum.com/68.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/68.html
Corrado 8y ago
On a related subject, I've noticed that my local gas station updated their software for their fuel pumps and it is terrible. For some reason the latency is very high, so high that I can't reliably type in my PIN. It literally takes 500ms - 1000ms for key-presses to register, plus it doesn't seem to cache them very well so if you go too fast it drops the key-press altogether. Finally, they changed the font to a fancy script that is difficult to read on the low resolution display. At first I thought it must be a hardware change or something on the back-end is slower. There is another gas station of the same brand just 3 miles away and it is still running the old version of the pump software, which is fast and user friendly. In fact, it makes me want to drive that extra bit in order to not have to put up with the slow software.
RayDonnelly 8y ago
Can we talk about slow maintainers here instead? Can you explain why you never responded to https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/619 https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/619 despite me asking you to several times over the course of many years?
- ggreer 8y ago
  Years ago I disabled github notifications and ignored pull requests because honestly, 95% of them are crap. So many of them degrade performance, break unrelated features, or are incompatible with certain platforms. I don't have the time or inclination to sift through them all to figure out which 5% are good, especially since I'm not getting paid for it. Sorry.
  - RayDonnelly 8y ago
    So it's not really an open source project in any meaningful way? Do you consider it reasonable for people to waste their time making PRs and working trying to help you to improve the silver searcher? Could you put something up describing this policy? Could you recruit someone who's proven themselves to be maybe somewhere near as good as you to be a co-maintainer? As I say I couldn't care less about my PR now since I've moved to rg, but this was an absolutely horrible experience. Either embrace open source and do it right or please, do not bother releasing source code.
    - ggreer 8y ago
      Other people want to modify my project, usually in ways that break it, and somehow I am obligated to provide my time and skills to them for free? I don't understand where you're coming from at all.
      - RayDonnelly 8y ago
        You answered none of my explicit questions. Hopefully a maintainer with a sense of community and responibility will fork the silver searcher.
piccolbo 8y ago
At first glance I thought it was the sw equivalent of the "slow food" movement. No such luck.

438 points by Thibaut 8y ago

I like how the site is an example of very fast software, such a simple design and it renders immediately; a single file load with the tiniest of javascript to make the videos work. A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred!

merb 8y ago
to be fair the site is a html site only and gets served via cloudflare. not a fair metric against a "dynamic" site. also most webservers/frameworks/whatever will favor throughput over latency.
- coder543 8y ago
  Ok, what about Hacker News? But the article discusses news website like WaPo that really don't need to be very dynamic.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  This site is fast, why should I care how it got fast?
- pdpi 8y ago
  dynamic sites are a choice, and achieving that richer level of interaction comes with its own costs. For every legitimately dynamic page out there (going all the way up to full-on applications), there’s many more that have no good reason to be anything other than static content that could be served from a cdn. Going pure html for a page that doesn’t need more is precisely the sort of design choice that goes with the mentality they’re advocating. Optimising for throughout rather than latency is, again, a design choice, and the article serves as an indictment of taking that too far.
microcolonel 8y ago
Though, if I were to critique it, I would say that the JS was not really necessary for such a simple case for video. There's only one <source> (I guess H.264 is considered ubiquitous now) and the big central play button just gets in the way of the video (and on most platforms, the default styling of the <video> element puts a big play button over top of it anyway).
greenyouse 8y ago
The only nitpick I have is that the sidebar comments are built in a weird way. They're nested in the middle of the paragraphs inside small tags. It would be a little nicer if they split the sidebar text into aside tags that come after the paragraph. It's refreshing to see a site that loads quickly though. That would've been a bit hypocritical otherwise :p
vanderZwan 8y ago
> A full page load in 27ms with only 14kb transferred! Nitpick: not really a full page load. The text part is 14 KiB, but once the website finished downloading the images and videos it's 14 MiB. However, because it does so via lazy loading (same for the PNGs), the text-parts are instantly rendered, and because it downloads all of the videos you have no buffering latency when clicking. So yeah, near-perfect example of how to design a website for low-latency while still maintaining rich media (the thumbnail PNGs could have been JPGs to save more data, and more importantly: lazy-load even faster).

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> Android and iOS both make substantial use of "long press" to access context menus, which require that the user wait hundreds of milliseconds in the middle of their command gestures. > A related source is delays for disambiguation. For example, on mobile Safari there's a default 350ms delay between when the user taps a link and when the browser begins fetching the new page, in order to tell the difference between a link click and a double-tap zoom. I really wish mobile devices had one or two modifier buttons on the side. That way you could have "right click", maybe even positioning a cursor without clicking, all sorts of crazy stuff, like being able to "mouse over" a link in a mobile browser.

cronix 8y ago
We can't do that. Buttons, and headphone jacks, are so yesterday. /s
ggreer 8y ago
Apple has 3D touch, where if you press firmly on the screen, the phone makes a tactile "click" and triggers a different action than normal tap. Annoyingly, Apple mapped 3D touch to a totally new set of actions instead of replacing long press.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Apple has slowly started merging the two, because it makes it easier for them to support devices with and without the feature.
Shank 8y ago
> I really wish mobile devices had one or two modifier buttons on the side. Look, I feel you in terms of lost functionality, but I don't when it comes to trying to explain how these systems work to my family. Android was notoriously bad because the back stack behaved totally sane to programmers, and insane to everyone else. When Android had a "menu" button on the bottom too, it was another source of confusion. "What does the menu button do?" Thinking back further, I know for a fact my mom didn't even know her phone had a trackball on it (hiya Android 2.x era), but she was mystified when I told her what it was and what it did. I'd rather someone fix the design problem of mapping taps to different things than add more buttons that are impossible to explain.

taneq 8y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again - one of the greatest boons from the new wave of VR is not the tech itself (fun though it is) but the focus on latency as a first-class metric. I've always been sensitive to microstuttering and so find it irritating when a game that's "running at 90fps" (or a document that's scrolling) still has perceptible judders.

chrisweekly 8y ago
is 'judder' a synonym for 'jank'?
- beefsack 8y ago
  No, "judder" is like a shaking or vibrating, "jank" just means bad quality.
  - singlow 8y ago
    Jank has a more specialized meaning here, related to delays in UI rendering that cause frames to be dropped intermittently which reduces the smoothness of motion. Judder is a perceived vibration or motion aliasing caused by the incoherence of consecutive frames at a fixed sample rate.
- jblow 8y ago
  ‘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.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    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 8y ago

coder543 8y ago

I 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 the embarrassment of seeing how incredibly fast JIRA is compared to their own sluggish offerings, right? I am confident that JIRA's application latency has nothing to do with Java (backend) or JavaScript's (frontend) garbage collector. Many companies just feel no impetus to write fast software, or to use commensurately powerful hardware.

Aeolun 8y ago
But to be fair, plain Jira can be pretty fast, it’s just when you get into an enterprise environment and people think they need 2000 different fields things fall apart.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  Why shouldn't 2000 fields be fast? Shouldn't all of what jira does boil down to straight forward SQL queries?
  - flattone 8y ago
    or even 200000 etc. I've never used but at a glance i feel like it's just a google sheets tracker with unnecessary visual stuff?
- coder543 8y ago
  I've never seen JIRA be "pretty fast", so I can't agree. I also think "2000 different fields" is an unfair exaggeration, if we're going to focus on being fair. The 10 to 20 fields that people might use per issue should not prevent JIRA from being fast with the right architecture.
  - viraptor 8y ago

pier25 8y ago

I 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?

guiltygatorade 8y ago
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 often. Then its responsiveness is likely going to be a much bigger factor. If gmail loads your inboxes and emails in hundreds of milliseconds but yahoo took several seconds, and a person needs to respond to lots of emails during the day, I'm sure the person would develop a preference for the former if all other things are equal.
- pier25 8y ago
  > 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.
oldandtired 8y ago
I just did a test from the main page to here. Clicking on the link to comments took about 4-5 seconds to render the comments. Doing a back then forward action in the browser appeared to be almost instantaneous (10's of milliseconds). I have noticed that many websites are being significantly slower these days. It, of course, could be due to the national monitoring scheme that is required now here in Australia. Using TOR to get access was a little slower to get access by about a second, otherwise back and forward are the same.

leowoo91 8y ago

I hope devs can fix the racing wheel latency first, so we can enjoy those racing games.

voltagex_ 8y ago
Which racing wheel have you tried? Was it implemented as a HID device (subject to the polling rate limitations described in the article) or with its own driver?
- leowoo91 8y ago
  I didn't buy single one since I have seen many youtube videos, all seem to have latency (yep, HID device). By latency I mean, when you throw steer, you can see it reflects about 1/3 second to the gameplay. It is very hard to blame slowest part, probably the game itself, but I really wish that would be solved.

robochat 8y ago

My 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.

saagarjha 8y ago
What’s worse is when the application drops events during that time.
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Main offender for me is chrome, so much lost typing in new tabs and windows
tartoran 8y ago
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.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > Rapid SQL > 10 seconds delay Oh the irony.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > 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. Most people, including technical folks, don't complain (unless extremely agitated) because they know they can do nothing about it but accept it. Doesn't stop making them miserable, though.
andrekandre 8y ago
this is unfortunately my almost daily experience using slack...

voltagex_ 8y ago

I 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-aspire-3-15-6-laptop-a315-21-40al-aca3152140 https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir.... Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 8y ago
The cheap androids aren't so shabby these days. A Moto G5 play is a quad core 1.4GHz with 2GB of ram. No speed demon, but is reasonable. $109.99 on Amazon, unlocked.
- mbell 8y ago
  Javascript/web performance on Android is universally bad but truly awful on the low end. A Moto G5 pulls ~14 on speedometer 2.0 which puts it in line with an iPhone 5/5s (5-6 year old devices). An iPhone XS scores around 123 in this benchmark for comparison, ~9 times faster.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    I concur, having just purchased a Nokia 5 (for €105) and being surprised it felt so much slower than my iPhone SE. I guess it's a sign that speed/$ is flattening out. The good part about it is devices will stay competitive longer.
HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
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.

daxfohl 8y ago

At the app level, I'd say it's about responsiveness not latency. Instagram had a post a while back about how they cheat a bit to make their app feel responsive even if actual latency was high. From this perspective one could say this article puts too much focus into the raw numbers, how many ms to a response. As techies, we like that: cheating is cheating. Numbers are important. But really we need to look harder, how can we make users perceive that things are better than the raw numbers.

microcolonel 8y ago

On the web, a lot of time is simply wasted by the browser before it even starts doing anything specific to your page (including the initial DNS and HTTP requests).

jumarm 8y ago

Further reading from Dan Luu, who wrote about this as well. [0] He goes into why the Apple 2e is so quick, the iOS Rendering pipeline, and general complexity of computing input. I find it really interesting that latency is so high on a lot of devices in 2018. 0. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ (2017)

gok 8y ago

The "user-hostile" section is kind of silly. Poor/lazy coding is also user-hostile. Requiring 20 megabytes of JavaScript frameworks because you're too lazy to figure out how to solve your feature requirements is user hostile. Maybe call that other stuff "monetization"

jccalhoun 8y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture) and arguing for software to be slower. I'm glad I was wrong.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
My understanding of Slow Food is that it isn't necessarily about "slowness" so to speak. More about keeping things close to nature and not interfering with them / overprocessing too much. Something similar would make sense for software (e.g. using lower level languages, less extraneous JS on websites etc)
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  turn on, tune in, NOP out

turrini 8y ago

Somebody once posted a well known news website with an alternate link that loaded instantly. Anyone remember this? I don't remember if it was WSJ, or NYT or something else.

saratogacx 8y ago
Likely not what you had in mind but news.yahoo.com is amazingly quick to load for me.
Zarel 8y ago
In theory, AMP pages should all load instantly, and most news websites have AMP pages. A lot of HNers hate AMP for other reasons, though; I think mostly Google's insistence on using their CDN for it, and for whitelisting mostly their own scripts for use in AMP.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > In theory, AMP pages should all load instantly In practice, AMP pages take a minimum of 5-10 seconds to load for me. Maybe Google is punishing me for my uBlock/uMatrix/Pi-Hole setup.
- icebraining 8y ago
  AMP loads "instantly" because Chrome preloads it, not because they're very fast. A simple page like [1] loads over a dozen JS files (including stuff like "amp-analytics"), which expand to over 1MB of code that has to be parsed. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-44802666 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-44802666
  - Zarel 8y ago
    Fair, but keep in mind that AMP loads scripts async, so the page is finished loading and usable well before stuff like amp-analytics is done being downloaded.
shakna 8y ago
A couple news sites have 'text-based' versions. Became popular as a way to give people in disaster areas with spotty signal a chance to find things out. These are some I found: [0] https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en [1] http://thin.npr.org/ http://thin.npr.org/

throwaway286 8y ago

I work at a large company that is not one of the famous silicon valley tech companies. One of the worst parts of working there is the heap of various enterprise anti-virus software they install on our computers. It brings huge typing and disk access latencies. Even opening files in vim with FZF is slow. I can't explain why but this makes programming so much less pleasant. I really just want to work somewhere without anti-virus.

silviogutierrez 8y ago
I'm currently picking the OS stack for all machines at my company. All guidance, even people I respect, point towards antivirus protection. Yet I lean towards nixing that. I know it's hugely ineffective. In fact, it opens up holes of its own[1]. And yet... it's like scaffolding in NYC[2]. Absolutely useless[3]. But if you are all for removing it, and a brick falls and hurts someone, heads will roll. Quite a quandary I - and other C-levels - face. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089872/security/security-vulnerabilities-in-symantec-and-norton-as-bad-as-it-gets-warns-researcher.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089872/security/secur... [2] Another contrarian passion of mine. [3] Bricks do fall and hurt people. But no more than scaffolding itself falls with the same effect.
- coder543 8y ago
  Microsoft Defender typically doesn't hurt performance or security much. The alternative is to run Mac or Linux stacks instead of a Windows stack, of course.
  - godDLL 8y ago
    While running a Linux stack may still work, your Mac info is outdated by three years, at least. Macs have entered the zoo in 2015.
    - coder543 8y ago
      For practical purposes, that's not true. Macs do not allow running unsigned software by default, and no one runs antivirus on Mac, ever. So even if they were commonly being infected, which they aren't, the person above would have organizational indemnity if someone were infected because they're following industry best practices by not running antivirus on Mac. If you want, you can further restrict Macs to only App Store software, which is heavily sandboxed. Then you can go even further by not allowing the individual users to install software on their own, if you really want to be draconian about it. Unless someone is being individually targeted, running very outdated software, or is intentionally trying to get themselves infected, it will not happen. Even if all three conditions are true, it's still very unlikely. Anyone who says otherwise is just fear mongering. That same level of fear mongering could point to the dozens of pieces of malware that have been released for Linux. I say this as someone who uses a Linux laptop for work and a Windows desktop at home. I don't have a dog in this fight. I do, however, try to stay very informed about the state of software security.

RemarkableMan 8y ago

You will never massage and cram all the remote cruft efficiently enough to get back the responsiveness of an Apple II. Today’s software is turtles all the way down from the library to the sub-library to the JIT to the application and OS and hardware and they each need 5-25 milliseconds to even wake up. That’s before you even hit the network. Things don’t get bad, they get worse.

majewsky 8y ago
> Today’s software is turtles all the way down from the library to the sub-library to the JIT to the application and OS and hardware and they each need 5-25 milliseconds to even wake up. Where do you get these numbers? I have programs that run from start to finish in 5 ms, including tons of OS syscalls. I think many of us forgot how efficient OSes are because of the shitshow that app developers put on top.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  I have a Go program that parses command line arguments, loads and parses a text file, then interprets that code on a faux-CPU. Total time 24ms start to finish for 107 faux-CPU steps (sorting 12 numbers of bunches of 3) according to `time`.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Mine is also a Go program that reads several files and does some basic computations on top of it. I wrote about the `time` measurements here: https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html

dorukane 8y ago

While comparing Samsung and Apple mobile device latencies the article gives these examples: Tapping latency examples (Videos slowed 16x): - Opening a settings tab on an iPhone 6s with ~90ms of latency. - Toggling a setting a Samsung S3 with ~330ms of latency. I agree latency is evil, I hated Android a while ago because of this. Apple always felt really fast compared to other OS. BUT it seems normal that toggling a setting proceeds a bit slower than just opening a tab no? It's like it's just a bad example.

keldaris 8y ago
Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? I still use an ancient OnePlusX that I got when it came out and I've disabled all UI animations, toggling most settings (with legitimate exceptions like activating the wifi hotspot feature) feels almost instant, certainly nothing close to 300 ms. Admittedly, I haven't used any iPhone in many years, so I can't really compare.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  > Isn't that just ridiculously slow animations for the most part? Agreed, and as the recent example with the iPhone calculator proved, Apple aren't exactly immune to this either.
  - keldaris 8y ago
    Can you just disable animations on Apple devices the way you can on Android?
    - gitgud 8y ago
      Yes, I think low power mode disables almost all animations on apple
      - keldaris 8y ago
        Wouldn't that also disable other features as well (push notifications, maybe?)? Animations are something I disable permanently just to have a better user experience, I wouldn't like to sacrifice anything else.

phtrivier 8y ago

> We hope this material is helpful for you as you work on your own software. Sadly, as interesting as the material in the article is (great to learn about the measured latencies of the hardware part), I fail to see much that is "actionnable" for a run-of-the-mill software developper. It seems the only advice is "don't download ad / tracking / social media - related stuff", but even that is not exactly in the developpers circle of influence. Who's going to make google analytics smaller to download ? (except, well, google ?) Is any developper really in the position to say "great news, our pages now load xxx ms faster !! However, you won't be able to compute your KPIs for this semester, is that a problem ?") Also, is "using a language without GC" accessible today for a web frontend developper ? (through some rust / wasm / whatever magic ?)

icebraining 8y ago
The author doesn't say you should use a language without GC, but minimize its effects. There are techniques to avoid GC churn by reducing allocations and the subsequent cleanups.
- majewsky 8y ago
  I heard an anecdote about how Minecraft got much slower when Notch (the original developer) turned it over to a team of employees. The new team did some refactoring, e.g. instead of calling functions like doWork(int x, int y, int z) they refactored that into doWork(Coordinate c) and that's when Minecraft started eating RAM like some sort of delicious candy, because now each time you deal with a new Coordinate, it's one more object to garbage-collect. The old method may not have been particularly pretty, but plain ints are allocated on the stack and thus reduce GC pressure. (BTW, can anyone confirm or deny that anecdote?)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dagw 8y ago
    I don't know about that particular anecdote, but the gist sounds very reasonable. I've seen/solved the exact same general thing in python on more than one occasion.

AnonC 8y ago

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this usage is across many processes (whose names I don’t understand), not just McAfee. Since it’s a work image of Windows, it has policies set to prevent me from changing many things. Where do I even start troubleshooting this issue and finding the culprits? Is it just a CPU usage issue and/or some kind of I/O issue? I haven’t yet tried using something like Process Explorer (from the sysinternals tools) to get a clearer idea of what’s happening (though I’m not sure if that’d help). I’m thinking of putting Linux on it as an alternative. Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.

raptorfactor 8y ago
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/
jack_pp 8y ago
You could try swapping the ssd with a new one with a fresh install of windows or even try dual booting a fresh install of windows to see if it's a software issue after all.
proxygeek 8y ago
In my experience on a similar configuration, most of the times such aliens is because of i/o bottleneck. Antivirus, Windows app optimisations, and device manufacturers' softwares running at predefined schedules, choking the disk might be a problem. You frontotemporal should check the process explorer next time you gave the issue. In the meantime, may be check the task scheduler to see if some heavy read write tasks are scheduled
hugg 8y ago
McAfee intercepts every IO read/write afaik, which makes it horribly slow

stirner 8y ago

> When dragging items on the screen, for example, users perceive latencies as low as ~2ms This seems doubtful, given that even a state-of-the-art 240Hz screen only refreshes every 4.16ms. I guess they could compare dragging on a screen to dragging a physical object, but that would still be comparing 4.16+ms latency to 0ms latency, which doesn't explain the 2ms figure.

alimbada 8y ago
> This seems doubtful Ever tried playing a fast paced game with VSync turned on?
- stirner 8y ago
  True, the next frame can start getting drawn before the last one, but every desktop compositor I know of uses vsync.
jerrre 8y ago
you could say with a 4.16ms refresh rate it takes on average ~2ms until the next frame?

okaleniuk 8y ago

Well, that's all good but it doesn't explain how did we get there. I think, Moore's law resulted in a resource curse for PC and mobile. Unlike with the shared computers from the past and cloud services from now, you pay not for the resources you use, but for the resources you own. And under the Moore's law they grew exponentially for quite a while, so the software simply followed the trend growing exponentially in overheads, too. Technical reasons are probably secondary, since we do still have real-time computing, and high-performance computations in their own respected niches. It's not that all software is inherently bad, it really depends on what it is for. I believe, the socio-economical reasons of the current state of software are most interesting and the least researched.

wink 8y ago

Only since I work fulltime with gcc hogging all my CPUs and most of my RAM for up to 10 minutes at a time and also slowing down the computer I fully appreciate having worked in dynamic languages for many years. Yes, that problem might be solvable with a beefy build box.

kpmah 8y ago
The difference is interpreted vs compiled, not dynamic vs typed. You can use a C interpreter to instantly run C code without compilation.
- wink 8y ago
  Of course you're right but it's equally often used for interpreted scripting languages. And I don't like the term scripting languages. Apparently naming is hard, who knew.

dandare 8y ago

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prioritized above everything else?? iOS got this right. Microsoft Outlook on Mac: it can teak easily 2000ms to close(!) a window, are you kidding me? My new 2018 Touchbar Mac does not "feel" any faster than my old 2013 retina Mac, while the paper specs and benchmarks show at least 100% increase in computational power. They can both equally easily choke down on some unwanted Skype update or stupid WebEx video stream (yes, I work in corporate).

deleted 8y ago
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lostgame 8y ago
I also work in corporate - my 2017 Touchbar feels insanely slower than my partner's 2013, or sometimes even my late 2011. Not to mention the awful keyboard and non-upgradable parts. Outlook is a nightmare - heck, the Office suite has been awful essentially since it's rewrite from being PPC-only for 2008. Not only did we have to wait way too long for a native Intel version / Universal Binary - but when it arrived, it was slow and clunky on both pieces of hardware. But worse than office - our entire team is now being migrated to cloud-based email that virtualizes itself in an IE window, and responds to clicks and scrolls about 40% of the time. It looks awful, it performs awful, I've never experienced quite a terrible piece of software. Weird, virtualized, Office 365 - unless you're on Windows, I couldn't imagine this working for you.
fredley 8y ago
Office on Mac is garbage - I had someone told me that it remains single-threaded on Mac which would explain this. I find my Pixel (v1) surprisingly fast given its age and have no plans to replace it currently, although the share menu slowness is weird. It happens any time the device has to enumerate the list of installed apps—like loading the apps page in settings—, which bizarrely it doesn't seem to cache.

reallydontask 8y ago

Link is blocked at work by McAfee Web gateway Url category is pornography

agumonkey 8y ago

there's slow as laggy and slow tempo I remember how I loved my slow hp48, the input buffer was still listening and I could easily think and keep typing operations while the screen was busy, never felt "slow"

jancsika 8y ago

Why aren't ads a data point in the infographic? Ads are a necessary component of the web atm. They typically insert a delay between the user's action (clicking a button, scanning paragraphs of text with one's eyes) and the desired behavior (watching a video, comprehending which text is the article vs. advertising pictures and/or text). So a Youtube app running on Fuschia could become a poster child for "anti slow software" based on the author's guidelines. Yet this would only deliver the user more quickly to the problem of ad latency-- a problem which is orders of magnitude worse UX than the problems listed in the article. It seems like inside baseball to make ad latency an externality to the core problems of slow software.

carapace 8y ago

I recently switched to an OpendBSD machine with no mouse. I have a large screen and use tmux-- no X windows --and a clicky gamer's keyboard. It's soooo nice. The only downside so far is that about ~%60 of the WWW sucks through Lynx... I have a separate machine on my desk that's basically a Firefox and VSCode kiosk now. But I've gotten a dead-tree hardcopy book on Vim...

thinclientwoe 8y ago

I spent a decade working in engineering at Intel. Basically all design work (as of 2016, and for 10+ years prior) is done over VNC to Linux servers in data centers. The experience was barely tolerable over 100mbit Ethernet to an on-site data center, and anything less was fairly abominable for just about anything other than working in a black and white terminal. The majority of the work is fairly graphical and most engineers rarely have the luxury of connecting to an on site data center. Over the years the situation both improved and worsened: Pluses: - circa 2010 some of us were lucky enough to get gigabit Ethernet connected to our desk. - circa 2010-2015 there were improvements to the VNC protocol like JPG and Zlib compression that helped a lot with bandwidth constrained situations (nearly all) - circa 2014 a lot of us got 802.11ac capable office APs and laptops, often pushing 300+ mbps reliably. Minuses: - The company shut down a bunch of datacenters and setup “hub” sites. Making most of us work over high latency WAN links even in the office. - More and more work seemed to get organized across sites, making many of us remote to far-off datacenters even if we were local to a hub. No one in engineering management or IT seemed to take the problem seriously. No wonder the company has floundered so much. To me an unresponsive interface completely spoils flow and dramatically reduces my productivity.

jodrellblank 8y ago

Related, dadgum.com's article "How much processing power does it take to be fast?" commenting on an arcade machine playing Defender with very low latency 30-40 years ago - https://prog21.dadgum.com/68.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/68.html

Corrado 8y ago

On a related subject, I've noticed that my local gas station updated their software for their fuel pumps and it is terrible. For some reason the latency is very high, so high that I can't reliably type in my PIN. It literally takes 500ms - 1000ms for key-presses to register, plus it doesn't seem to cache them very well so if you go too fast it drops the key-press altogether. Finally, they changed the font to a fancy script that is difficult to read on the low resolution display. At first I thought it must be a hardware change or something on the back-end is slower. There is another gas station of the same brand just 3 miles away and it is still running the old version of the pump software, which is fast and user friendly. In fact, it makes me want to drive that extra bit in order to not have to put up with the slow software.

RayDonnelly 8y ago

Can we talk about slow maintainers here instead? Can you explain why you never responded to https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/619 https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/619 despite me asking you to several times over the course of many years?

ggreer 8y ago
Years ago I disabled github notifications and ignored pull requests because honestly, 95% of them are crap. So many of them degrade performance, break unrelated features, or are incompatible with certain platforms. I don't have the time or inclination to sift through them all to figure out which 5% are good, especially since I'm not getting paid for it. Sorry.
- RayDonnelly 8y ago
  So it's not really an open source project in any meaningful way? Do you consider it reasonable for people to waste their time making PRs and working trying to help you to improve the silver searcher? Could you put something up describing this policy? Could you recruit someone who's proven themselves to be maybe somewhere near as good as you to be a co-maintainer? As I say I couldn't care less about my PR now since I've moved to rg, but this was an absolutely horrible experience. Either embrace open source and do it right or please, do not bother releasing source code.
  - ggreer 8y ago
    Other people want to modify my project, usually in ways that break it, and somehow I am obligated to provide my time and skills to them for free? I don't understand where you're coming from at all.
    - RayDonnelly 8y ago
      You answered none of my explicit questions. Hopefully a maintainer with a sense of community and responibility will fork the silver searcher.

piccolbo 8y ago

At first glance I thought it was the sw equivalent of the "slow food" movement. No such luck.