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That your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention: > mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not ev

That your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention: > mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. But a P90 could not only play wav files (in fact my 386 with 4MB of RAM could play and edit wav files in realtime just fine under Windows 3.1) but also both decode and play mp3 files at the background while doing other tasks in Windows 95. That mpv and mplayer are not able to do that shows that they require way more resources than is really necessary to perform the task at hand. > People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here. That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. And being unable or hard to run modern software on a P90 is because of the state of current software, but that doesn't mean software has to be like that because it is "modern" - someone explicitly made a choice to develop the software in a way that causes it to be like that.

The_Colonel 6y ago
> That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. Developer work is expensive and there's always a backlog of fixes and features. Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This time could be spend developing features with actual user impact.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Right, this is the usually the most common reason brought up. And depending on the situation, it is correct - it is the "depends on other matters" part i wrote.
- mbirth 6y ago
  > Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This hides a big problem of today’s software. Instead of having time to actually think about their software and optimise it, it’s all about throughput and making the economists happy. That’s why projects use various ready-to-use frameworks and get bloated very quickly. And time to look at the whole monstrosity and think about how you can slim it down “is not reasonable” as nobody pays for that. Users are supposed to get a better computer instead.
  - ausbah 6y ago
    economists happy? I'd argue it's just normal business incentives
    - qubex 6y ago
      The constant ratchet on users to provide ever-increasing amounts of computing resources is a textbook case of an ‘externality’ for the developers so we get the whole usual Tragedy Of The Commons situation yada yada yada. Applying this to the original question one gets that if performance ceases to increase users can no longer be expected to endlessly ramp up their specs so suddenly optimisation and slimming-down will be in vogue.
- krageon 6y ago
  I guarantee you 99% of what is on a dev's backlog is senseless busywork that doesn't do anything important. The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions. Those decisions end up being the wrong decisions basically every time, but those are the times we live in.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions. Developers focused on building their resume or playing with the latest fadtech are at least as much to blame!
    - bitwize 6y ago
      The bottom line is, if you don't play with the latest fadtech you end up sidelined into a niche, career-wise. God help you if your niche ever goes away; even if it doesn't, embedded C++ developers make about half of what Node.js webshit developers make, despite the job requiring more in the way of specialized skills.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. such a very-first-world country way of thinking. Hell, I live in france, in a fairly affluent city (Bordeaux), and my two neighbors run their stuff on 15 year old computers as buying newer computers is not really an expense they can make that easily. But they will never be able to complain to anyone & make their voice heard (except to me, their computer geek neighbor) that things are slow - they don't even know that things could be faster.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong. I wish I could dedicate half my time just to tweak the performance of my apps. I love them fast too and optimization is quite fun. But there's a cost - my apps will suffer in other ways and won't be able to offer other features.
kristopolous 6y ago
I honestly used to agree with you until I did this project.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  I have a bunch of old PCs around (i like collecting them and toying around with them) and i did try to run modern stuff of them with similar results to yours, but my takeaway is always that modern stuff is just bloated without actual need to be - at least most of the time anyway. Software doesn't have to be slow. My favorite example is Total Commander - a file manager that is still under active development for Windows which not needs almost very little memory (right now i have it open with 10 tabs -and had it open for a while- and it uses 7.3MB of memory) but even runs on something like a P133 with 16MB of RAM running Win95. It wont be that fast, but it will be perfectly usable and packs so many features (actual visible features, not stuff that theoretically might be useful but are behind 29301 layers and i may not even see them or even care about them) that i do not mind.
tluyben2 6y ago
You have more luck seeing how this works on systems that are not x86 / did not make it out of the 70/80/90s but that were popular then. The fact that this [0] runs on a 3.6mhz processor with 128kb memory shows what can be done when you chisel away at software that has to run on hardware that will not improve. [0] http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/

The_Colonel 6y ago

> That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters. Developer work is expensive and there's always a backlog of fixes and features. Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This time could be spend developing features with actual user impact.

badsectoracula 6y ago
Right, this is the usually the most common reason brought up. And depending on the situation, it is correct - it is the "depends on other matters" part i wrote.
mbirth 6y ago
> Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This hides a big problem of today’s software. Instead of having time to actually think about their software and optimise it, it’s all about throughput and making the economists happy. That’s why projects use various ready-to-use frameworks and get bloated very quickly. And time to look at the whole monstrosity and think about how you can slim it down “is not reasonable” as nobody pays for that. Users are supposed to get a better computer instead.
- ausbah 6y ago
  economists happy? I'd argue it's just normal business incentives
  - qubex 6y ago
    The constant ratchet on users to provide ever-increasing amounts of computing resources is a textbook case of an ‘externality’ for the developers so we get the whole usual Tragedy Of The Commons situation yada yada yada. Applying this to the original question one gets that if performance ceases to increase users can no longer be expected to endlessly ramp up their specs so suddenly optimisation and slimming-down will be in vogue.
krageon 6y ago
I guarantee you 99% of what is on a dev's backlog is senseless busywork that doesn't do anything important. The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions. Those decisions end up being the wrong decisions basically every time, but those are the times we live in.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions. Developers focused on building their resume or playing with the latest fadtech are at least as much to blame!
  - bitwize 6y ago
    The bottom line is, if you don't play with the latest fadtech you end up sidelined into a niche, career-wise. God help you if your niche ever goes away; even if it doesn't, embedded C++ developers make about half of what Node.js webshit developers make, despite the job requiring more in the way of specialized skills.
jcelerier 6y ago
> in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. such a very-first-world country way of thinking. Hell, I live in france, in a fairly affluent city (Bordeaux), and my two neighbors run their stuff on 15 year old computers as buying newer computers is not really an expense they can make that easily. But they will never be able to complain to anyone & make their voice heard (except to me, their computer geek neighbor) that things are slow - they don't even know that things could be faster.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong. I wish I could dedicate half my time just to tweak the performance of my apps. I love them fast too and optimization is quite fun. But there's a cost - my apps will suffer in other ways and won't be able to offer other features.

kristopolous 6y ago

I honestly used to agree with you until I did this project.

badsectoracula 6y ago
I have a bunch of old PCs around (i like collecting them and toying around with them) and i did try to run modern stuff of them with similar results to yours, but my takeaway is always that modern stuff is just bloated without actual need to be - at least most of the time anyway. Software doesn't have to be slow. My favorite example is Total Commander - a file manager that is still under active development for Windows which not needs almost very little memory (right now i have it open with 10 tabs -and had it open for a while- and it uses 7.3MB of memory) but even runs on something like a P133 with 16MB of RAM running Win95. It wont be that fast, but it will be perfectly usable and packs so many features (actual visible features, not stuff that theoretically might be useful but are behind 29301 layers and i may not even see them or even care about them) that i do not mind.

tluyben2 6y ago

You have more luck seeing how this works on systems that are not x86 / did not make it out of the 70/80/90s but that were popular then. The fact that this [0] runs on a 3.6mhz processor with 128kb memory shows what can be done when you chisel away at software that has to run on hardware that will not improve. [0] http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/