4 ms·

I just switched from a laptop with spinning rust and an Intel Celeron N2830 to a laptop with an SSD and a Ryzen 5 4500U. Each of the six cores is several times

by foxdev 6y ago

I just switched from a laptop with spinning rust and an Intel Celeron N2830 to a laptop with an SSD and a Ryzen 5 4500U. Each of the six cores is several times more powerful than the old CPU. Now I get why so many developers build sites that were unusable on the old one. Even a JavaScript-heavy site is as performant as a static site now. They don't even realize what they're doing to people stuck on old low-end computers. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-4500U/2213vs3702 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-...

josephg 6y ago
A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work, and couldn't program over a long weekend. I had a first generation raspberry pi kicking around so I pulled that out, hooked it up to my monitor, installed nodejs and git and got to work from there. It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi. Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.
- greggman3 6y ago
  In Chrome (and I'm guessing other browsers) you can go into the network tab and slow down networking. I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load. Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.
  - elgatoblanco 6y ago
    Actually there is. You can chose to throttle your cpu by 4x or 6x. Really useful not only for optimizing your sites speed but also for finding subtle race conditions.
  - kabes 6y ago
    It's kinda limited though. Like it doesn't affect websocket and webrtc traffic.
    - greggman3 6y ago
      file a bug
  - raicem 6y ago
    > I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. I believe there is an option in the Performance pane to throttle the CPU in Chrome.
- nullify88 6y ago
  > ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing Some games supposedly have been optimised similarly by running parts of it on a C64 or Amiga. I cant recall the game or studio but John Carmack comes to mind.

by foxdev 6y ago

josephg 6y ago

A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work, and couldn't program over a long weekend. I had a first generation raspberry pi kicking around so I pulled that out, hooked it up to my monitor, installed nodejs and git and got to work from there. It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi. Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.

greggman3 6y ago
In Chrome (and I'm guessing other browsers) you can go into the network tab and slow down networking. I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load. Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.
- elgatoblanco 6y ago
  Actually there is. You can chose to throttle your cpu by 4x or 6x. Really useful not only for optimizing your sites speed but also for finding subtle race conditions.
- kabes 6y ago
  It's kinda limited though. Like it doesn't affect websocket and webrtc traffic.
  - greggman3 6y ago
    file a bug
- raicem 6y ago
  > I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. I believe there is an option in the Performance pane to throttle the CPU in Chrome.
nullify88 6y ago
> ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing Some games supposedly have been optimised similarly by running parts of it on a C64 or Amiga. I cant recall the game or studio but John Carmack comes to mind.