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If electron apps' claimed memory causes your computer to go slow due to swapping, you should complain. But most complaints I see on this topic stem from a disco

by gfodor 7y ago

If electron apps' claimed memory causes your computer to go slow due to swapping, you should complain. But most complaints I see on this topic stem from a discomfort over the reported figure by the operating system. With SSDs and modern virtual memory systems the claimed memory figure is not a sufficient measure to infer the resource utilization of a process. For example, if slack has a bunch of allocated memory that is rarely accessed, it's going to (at worst) land on your SSD and sit there, having no impact on your user experience. If you want to complain about applications' engineering, you should complain not about claimed memory but about things that are directly affecting resource utilization or user experience like power draw or excessive CPU utilization due to poor programming. Claimed memory must be combined with a profile to show that cold reads are common enough for the claimed memory figure to be correlated with a performance hit. But of course, this often isn't readily available without profiling for all but the most extreme cases, and so engineering types fixate on easily visible measures like claimed memory that likely have no actual resource utilization impact in most cases.

forgottenpass 7y ago
>If electron apps' claimed memory causes your computer to go slow due to swapping, you should complain. But most complaints I see on this topic stem from a discomfort over the reported figure by the operating system. I tried that once. But I'm sick of having to fight that my usecase is valid, that my laptop isn't too old, and that it isn't broken/misconfigured in some other way. It's 4 years old, and I can't run 2 electron applications and firefox at the same time without swapping so hard I can't get anything done. Fuck me for asking so much from a computer, right?
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  No idea why you're getting downvotes. I think this actually is a problem in the dev world. They often have overpowered systems compared to the average user and as a result might not realize or simply don't care how their software performs on lower end systems. One example that's driving me mad is shotwell (photo managing software). For some reason whenever you start it, it is crawling your entire collection of photos again. There are countless rejected tickets from people asking to add an option to disable it. I personally manage my photos on an older laptop with a spinning 2tb drive, for when I travel... So I'm somewhere without a power outlet in reach, battery sitting at 12%, and would like to quickly show some photos to a friend, but opening up shotwell will make sure that remaining battery will be drained in an instant. But the neckbeards developing that software sitting in their basements with 4 SSDs running in raid 0 just fail to understand what my problem is. Sadly I haven't found a good replacement so far, feature wise. Edit: Also forgetting your password sucks ;-)
- gfodor 7y ago
  I very specifically cited someone like you as being a person who has a valid complaint. I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc. This is common and is a form of "visibility bias". For example, computers do not report their CPU cache miss rates in a highly visible place. I'd imagine if they did, you'd have countless people agonizing over them, despite the fact that in most cases a higher cache miss rate would not result in perceptible difference when using the computer.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    > I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc. But who gets to make that call? For every person out there who complaints that using voice chat in Discord on a MacBook Pro on battery causes the chassis to heat up, fans to kick into turbo boost, and the battery to dwindle — but only when using the .app, not when using the website through Firefox, there's another person who says "oh, but my computer doesn't do that". So then everybody who has a similar complaint as the first person is branded a liar and whiner.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
We used to boot entire operating systems full of applications off HDDs into <1GB of ram. Waste is waste, and it is a shame that developers think it is totally ok just because their company-bought workstation is top of the line and replaced every year.
- winrid 7y ago
  Heh, replaced every year. Current company has mostly 2015 MBPs for the devs still in use. Good specs though.

by gfodor 7y ago

forgottenpass 7y ago

>If electron apps' claimed memory causes your computer to go slow due to swapping, you should complain. But most complaints I see on this topic stem from a discomfort over the reported figure by the operating system. I tried that once. But I'm sick of having to fight that my usecase is valid, that my laptop isn't too old, and that it isn't broken/misconfigured in some other way. It's 4 years old, and I can't run 2 electron applications and firefox at the same time without swapping so hard I can't get anything done. Fuck me for asking so much from a computer, right?

iforgotpassword 7y ago
No idea why you're getting downvotes. I think this actually is a problem in the dev world. They often have overpowered systems compared to the average user and as a result might not realize or simply don't care how their software performs on lower end systems. One example that's driving me mad is shotwell (photo managing software). For some reason whenever you start it, it is crawling your entire collection of photos again. There are countless rejected tickets from people asking to add an option to disable it. I personally manage my photos on an older laptop with a spinning 2tb drive, for when I travel... So I'm somewhere without a power outlet in reach, battery sitting at 12%, and would like to quickly show some photos to a friend, but opening up shotwell will make sure that remaining battery will be drained in an instant. But the neckbeards developing that software sitting in their basements with 4 SSDs running in raid 0 just fail to understand what my problem is. Sadly I haven't found a good replacement so far, feature wise. Edit: Also forgetting your password sucks ;-)
gfodor 7y ago
I very specifically cited someone like you as being a person who has a valid complaint. I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc. This is common and is a form of "visibility bias". For example, computers do not report their CPU cache miss rates in a highly visible place. I'd imagine if they did, you'd have countless people agonizing over them, despite the fact that in most cases a higher cache miss rate would not result in perceptible difference when using the computer.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  > I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc. But who gets to make that call? For every person out there who complaints that using voice chat in Discord on a MacBook Pro on battery causes the chassis to heat up, fans to kick into turbo boost, and the battery to dwindle — but only when using the .app, not when using the website through Firefox, there's another person who says "oh, but my computer doesn't do that". So then everybody who has a similar complaint as the first person is branded a liar and whiner.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

We used to boot entire operating systems full of applications off HDDs into <1GB of ram. Waste is waste, and it is a shame that developers think it is totally ok just because their company-bought workstation is top of the line and replaced every year.

winrid 7y ago
Heh, replaced every year. Current company has mostly 2015 MBPs for the devs still in use. Good specs though.