10 ms·

User to Dev: the memory usage is excessive. Dev with 256 GB RAM to User: WFM I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to develo

User to Dev: the memory usage is excessive. Dev with 256 GB RAM to User: WFM I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to developers having above-average network connections and super beefy computers. Combine that with fresh or minimal installs while testing the software, without lots of data that accumulated over month or years of use and in consequence they experience their products as super snappy. Summary: they maybe never experience their products as a normal user would.

christophilus 6y ago
I agree. I have a second, crummy old laptop for just this reason. I can't quite bring myself to develop on an underpowered machine, but it is useful to have one as a reference. Also, my phone is old because I'm a cheapskate, so that helps tremendously with assessing mobile performance.
- bluedino 6y ago
  >> I agree. I have a second, crummy old laptop for just this reason. Learned this the hard way. Made an editor, everyone loved it. Added features, people loved it. Kept adding features...then it was called slow, bloated etc. Everything seemed fine on my new-at-the-time iMac. Went into a conference room where we had one of the first Intel MacBook Pros...there were portions of the editor where you could literally see things being redrawn. A night of optimizations later, performance was restored.
levosmetalo 6y ago
Why is everyone assuming that just because someone works for Google has to be competent? Solving algorithmic puzzles is not an indicator or actual technical skills. To me, it looks like a work of incompetent developers led by incompetent technical managers upon requirements of clueless and ignorant product managers.
- notretarded 6y ago
  Found the google interview reject.
- gravypod 6y ago
  Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...).
  - levosmetalo 6y ago
    > Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. Yep, already covered that under incompetence and cluelessness. > GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...). In that case, I would assume that backend team indeed consist of competent people, as opposed to web team. But TFA was about front end experience which is abysmal.
    - musha68k 6y ago
      They had some big outages over the last year. I’m therefore still skeptical to bet on them from a “backend” operations reliability standpoint also. To be fair I’m not sure they are doing worse than AWS though when looking into details. I’m thinking recent AWS Kinesis us-east issue - move fast and break things? Maybe uptime is more important than a gazillion new “feature” services. I also prefer good terraform provider stewardship over any “fancy” new cloudformation CDK or “beautiful” GUI actually. It’s complicated.
  - maxsilver 6y ago
    > Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. (snip) GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. That's still incompetence. That counts as incompetence, too. "This restaurant is filthy and full of bugs, but that's OK, because they're take-out only, so they're not optimizing for the same thing the average sit-down restaurant is. Sure, that place is disgusting, but the food in box still tasted pretty good..."
jon-wood 6y ago
I suspect there's something in that comment on above-average network connections - the people working on Google Cloud's UI are going to be doing so from Google networks, or over a Google VPN, which means they'll be seeing much lower latency to your average person who has to be bounced around their ISP network and then across a couple of peering providers before getting there.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  This stuff is dead slow even on a fast machine with fast connections. The problem isn't people don't know. The problem is the software is drowning in layers of complexity and abstraction, and it's all in JavaScript not an optimized native language.
- zerkten 6y ago
  There can be some more nuance to this. The devs can often see the problems, but know more optimization is needed. They've done everything to implement what a PM asked. When the PM views it with ideal network conditions they assume it's more than ready. At this point their focus is on shipping sooner so the next thing can be worked on. The devs can never talk them back. Users then complain on Twitter about the crappy perf. This is a process and cultural failure too. The perf can be quantified and tracked to some extent. Even proxy metrics like the growth of assets over time can help. Cultural events like poor handling of weekly demo days can create undue pressure on shipping poor implementations. Someone implements a great idea badly, it catches management attention (or helps the sales team), and next Monday it gets released. Over time this behavior can hurt customers and it always frustrates internal efforts to do the right things for perf.
- smueller1234 6y ago
  Throughout 2020, this hasn't actually been true.
searchableguy 6y ago
This happens with web design a lot. I have a great monitor with a 1080p budget monitor on the side. It makes a huge difference when thinking about shadows, UI changes, etc which are almost invisible on the 1080p sometimes. I test my sites on both.
midrus 6y ago
This is something that really concerns me about the new M1 based Macbooks. We as developers in the first world are very likely to be the first ones getting these, and this will make the gap with the average end user which usually does not have a mac a lot worse. I'm not far from imagining a non so distant distopic future where everyone just gets used to slow, laggy, clunky websites and applications. Oh... wait...
- absolutelyrad 6y ago
  And their material UI is ugly.
- random3 6y ago
  As a developer you should 1) have the fastest possible code / test cycle - i.e. it's worth overpaying for faster machines 2) treat performance as a feature and formally measure it across configurations
  - midrus 6y ago
    I've worked for many companies, small and large, corporate and startups. None of them had performance as a priority, or even considered at the product level. Any minimal performance optimization or win we had was because a developer cared enough for it.... but maybe I'm the only one and just had bad luck with the product managers/owners I had.
    - sempron64 6y ago
      In my experience performance became a secondary (not primary!) priority once big customers began to threaten to not renew their contracts
      - sitkack 6y ago
        I have seen the same basic cycle, management says don't focus on perf, just "knock out" (I despise this lingo) the features. They have this overconfidence, but flop on the next release and patronize the dev team about perf. 1) tracked from the beginning so it is drained from the system merge by merge 2) architected in at the design level and not applied as a spell. I really like what the rust team is doing with tracking rustc compilation times. Another reason that integration tests are the best tests. https://perf.rust-lang.org/status.html https://perf.rust-lang.org/status.html
ubercow13 6y ago
I don't think it is just that. Google is just shockingly bad at web frontend. All their properties are terrible, except maybe Youtube which I find quite agreeable. For example I just made a search on google.com, the most popular website in the world, and it can't even fit the content into this reasonably sized window [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png
- sorenjan 6y ago
  Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend? UX seems to always be far down on the list or priorities for modern websites.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    I find Github and Amazon's main site to be pretty reasonable in comparison.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
      As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.
      - Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
        I felt the same way with Amazon. Before then it was easy to navigate and finding the product that I want to buy. Now, I couldn't navigate it well like I did in the past. And asian-sounding names products took over first few pages of result which made it difficult to filter out. And they are crap quality products. It is easily to tell which products is made in. Hint the brand name is all capitalized.
      - 295310e0 6y ago
        I am simply happy that Amazon has not embraced the ridiculous trend of low-information density with large amounts of whitespace. Give me a cluttered UI that has everything available any day.
badLiveware 6y ago
My company fixed this by making us use under dimensioned VMs for development. Unfortunately it has not fixed the issue.
brazzy 6y ago
That idea is very common, and very silly. Who says that if they experienced the software the same as a normal user, they would automatically improve its performance? This may apply for parts of open source development, where developers work on stuff for their own use. But even they may have other priorities. And as a commercial developer, your backlog is constantly full. You may have some leeway to choose what you work on, but there is absolutely no guarantee it will be performance, just because you personally experience bad performance. The way to get performance improvements is to make it a business priority to measure and improve performance. And for that, it is absolutely not necessary for developers to be slower in everything they do, just so they can experience their software's performance "realistically".
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  I’m unsure why the original idea seems silly, when it simply states a possible reason for this problem today. Giving a developer observability is the first step, that’s what they are pointing out —- some ways developers interface with features don’t include information that could deliver a higher value feature. A company can choose whether to deliver that higher quality or not with that information, ignorance removes that choice. If a company has that information and doesn’t care, that’s one thing. There’s more than a handful of companies that just don’t have the information to even know if they should care. I think most people would agree that we should use tooling to make it so that developers are aware of their blind spots, such as supporting systems with lower resources or a more inconsistent network. The Netflix blog had a nice post that included a tool they used to observe the UX under certain failure cases, which is a nice example of this [0]. [0] https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-prioritized-load-shedding-6cc827b02f94 https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-p...
brainzap 6y ago
Thats so true, devs also should try out a 5 year old phone and a slower ISP.
kevindong 6y ago
> I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to developers having above-average network connections and super beefy computers More realistically, they're serving up the assets from a web server on their machine. Which means that network I/O time is effectively nil.
tantalor 6y ago
> above-average network connections and super beefy computers Googlers have been WFH since March on laptops and residential Internet & WiFi.
markdog12 6y ago
I use this UI all day, every day on a Ryzen 3900 with 12 cores, 24 threads, 32GB RAM, 300Mbps connection. It's always extremely slow, takes up obscene amounts of CPU and RAM. It's mind-boggling how they think, "this is ok". The move to, "let's show them a pretty G spinner to compensate, because research shows that'll make them think it's fast" irks me to no end.
- markdog12 6y ago
  Here's a couple of tabs, one is a dashboard taking up 1.5GB RAM, the other is a k8s deployment page, taking up 1GB. It seems any tab takes up a ton of RAM. CPU also locks up completely in those tabs routinely. The chance that occurs correlates with how long a tab is open. https://imgur.com/a/i9L45ZM https://imgur.com/a/i9L45ZM
datavirtue 6y ago
Thirty years ago grandpa always said I should dev on the slowest machine we have.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

christophilus 6y ago

I agree. I have a second, crummy old laptop for just this reason. I can't quite bring myself to develop on an underpowered machine, but it is useful to have one as a reference. Also, my phone is old because I'm a cheapskate, so that helps tremendously with assessing mobile performance.

bluedino 6y ago
>> I agree. I have a second, crummy old laptop for just this reason. Learned this the hard way. Made an editor, everyone loved it. Added features, people loved it. Kept adding features...then it was called slow, bloated etc. Everything seemed fine on my new-at-the-time iMac. Went into a conference room where we had one of the first Intel MacBook Pros...there were portions of the editor where you could literally see things being redrawn. A night of optimizations later, performance was restored.

levosmetalo 6y ago

Why is everyone assuming that just because someone works for Google has to be competent? Solving algorithmic puzzles is not an indicator or actual technical skills. To me, it looks like a work of incompetent developers led by incompetent technical managers upon requirements of clueless and ignorant product managers.

notretarded 6y ago
Found the google interview reject.
gravypod 6y ago
Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...).
- levosmetalo 6y ago
  > Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible. Yep, already covered that under incompetence and cluelessness. > GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...). In that case, I would assume that backend team indeed consist of competent people, as opposed to web team. But TFA was about front end experience which is abysmal.
  - musha68k 6y ago
    They had some big outages over the last year. I’m therefore still skeptical to bet on them from a “backend” operations reliability standpoint also. To be fair I’m not sure they are doing worse than AWS though when looking into details. I’m thinking recent AWS Kinesis us-east issue - move fast and break things? Maybe uptime is more important than a gazillion new “feature” services. I also prefer good terraform provider stewardship over any “fancy” new cloudformation CDK or “beautiful” GUI actually. It’s complicated.
- maxsilver 6y ago
  > Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. (snip) GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. That's still incompetence. That counts as incompetence, too. "This restaurant is filthy and full of bugs, but that's OK, because they're take-out only, so they're not optimizing for the same thing the average sit-down restaurant is. Sure, that place is disgusting, but the food in box still tasted pretty good..."

jon-wood 6y ago

I suspect there's something in that comment on above-average network connections - the people working on Google Cloud's UI are going to be doing so from Google networks, or over a Google VPN, which means they'll be seeing much lower latency to your average person who has to be bounced around their ISP network and then across a couple of peering providers before getting there.

alisonkisk 6y ago
This stuff is dead slow even on a fast machine with fast connections. The problem isn't people don't know. The problem is the software is drowning in layers of complexity and abstraction, and it's all in JavaScript not an optimized native language.
zerkten 6y ago
There can be some more nuance to this. The devs can often see the problems, but know more optimization is needed. They've done everything to implement what a PM asked. When the PM views it with ideal network conditions they assume it's more than ready. At this point their focus is on shipping sooner so the next thing can be worked on. The devs can never talk them back. Users then complain on Twitter about the crappy perf. This is a process and cultural failure too. The perf can be quantified and tracked to some extent. Even proxy metrics like the growth of assets over time can help. Cultural events like poor handling of weekly demo days can create undue pressure on shipping poor implementations. Someone implements a great idea badly, it catches management attention (or helps the sales team), and next Monday it gets released. Over time this behavior can hurt customers and it always frustrates internal efforts to do the right things for perf.
smueller1234 6y ago
Throughout 2020, this hasn't actually been true.

searchableguy 6y ago

This happens with web design a lot. I have a great monitor with a 1080p budget monitor on the side. It makes a huge difference when thinking about shadows, UI changes, etc which are almost invisible on the 1080p sometimes. I test my sites on both.

midrus 6y ago

This is something that really concerns me about the new M1 based Macbooks. We as developers in the first world are very likely to be the first ones getting these, and this will make the gap with the average end user which usually does not have a mac a lot worse. I'm not far from imagining a non so distant distopic future where everyone just gets used to slow, laggy, clunky websites and applications. Oh... wait...

absolutelyrad 6y ago
And their material UI is ugly.
random3 6y ago
As a developer you should 1) have the fastest possible code / test cycle - i.e. it's worth overpaying for faster machines 2) treat performance as a feature and formally measure it across configurations
- midrus 6y ago
  I've worked for many companies, small and large, corporate and startups. None of them had performance as a priority, or even considered at the product level. Any minimal performance optimization or win we had was because a developer cared enough for it.... but maybe I'm the only one and just had bad luck with the product managers/owners I had.
  - sempron64 6y ago
    In my experience performance became a secondary (not primary!) priority once big customers began to threaten to not renew their contracts
    - sitkack 6y ago
      I have seen the same basic cycle, management says don't focus on perf, just "knock out" (I despise this lingo) the features. They have this overconfidence, but flop on the next release and patronize the dev team about perf. 1) tracked from the beginning so it is drained from the system merge by merge 2) architected in at the design level and not applied as a spell. I really like what the rust team is doing with tracking rustc compilation times. Another reason that integration tests are the best tests. https://perf.rust-lang.org/status.html https://perf.rust-lang.org/status.html

ubercow13 6y ago

I don't think it is just that. Google is just shockingly bad at web frontend. All their properties are terrible, except maybe Youtube which I find quite agreeable. For example I just made a search on google.com, the most popular website in the world, and it can't even fit the content into this reasonably sized window [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png

sorenjan 6y ago
Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend? UX seems to always be far down on the list or priorities for modern websites.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  I find Github and Amazon's main site to be pretty reasonable in comparison.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
    As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.
    - Isthatablackgsd 6y ago
      I felt the same way with Amazon. Before then it was easy to navigate and finding the product that I want to buy. Now, I couldn't navigate it well like I did in the past. And asian-sounding names products took over first few pages of result which made it difficult to filter out. And they are crap quality products. It is easily to tell which products is made in. Hint the brand name is all capitalized.
    - 295310e0 6y ago
      I am simply happy that Amazon has not embraced the ridiculous trend of low-information density with large amounts of whitespace. Give me a cluttered UI that has everything available any day.

badLiveware 6y ago

My company fixed this by making us use under dimensioned VMs for development. Unfortunately it has not fixed the issue.

brazzy 6y ago

That idea is very common, and very silly. Who says that if they experienced the software the same as a normal user, they would automatically improve its performance? This may apply for parts of open source development, where developers work on stuff for their own use. But even they may have other priorities. And as a commercial developer, your backlog is constantly full. You may have some leeway to choose what you work on, but there is absolutely no guarantee it will be performance, just because you personally experience bad performance. The way to get performance improvements is to make it a business priority to measure and improve performance. And for that, it is absolutely not necessary for developers to be slower in everything they do, just so they can experience their software's performance "realistically".

alextheparrot 6y ago
I’m unsure why the original idea seems silly, when it simply states a possible reason for this problem today. Giving a developer observability is the first step, that’s what they are pointing out —- some ways developers interface with features don’t include information that could deliver a higher value feature. A company can choose whether to deliver that higher quality or not with that information, ignorance removes that choice. If a company has that information and doesn’t care, that’s one thing. There’s more than a handful of companies that just don’t have the information to even know if they should care. I think most people would agree that we should use tooling to make it so that developers are aware of their blind spots, such as supporting systems with lower resources or a more inconsistent network. The Netflix blog had a nice post that included a tool they used to observe the UX under certain failure cases, which is a nice example of this [0]. [0] https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-prioritized-load-shedding-6cc827b02f94 https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-netflix-reliable-using-p...

brainzap 6y ago

Thats so true, devs also should try out a 5 year old phone and a slower ISP.

kevindong 6y ago

> I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to developers having above-average network connections and super beefy computers More realistically, they're serving up the assets from a web server on their machine. Which means that network I/O time is effectively nil.

tantalor 6y ago

> above-average network connections and super beefy computers Googlers have been WFH since March on laptops and residential Internet & WiFi.

markdog12 6y ago

I use this UI all day, every day on a Ryzen 3900 with 12 cores, 24 threads, 32GB RAM, 300Mbps connection. It's always extremely slow, takes up obscene amounts of CPU and RAM. It's mind-boggling how they think, "this is ok". The move to, "let's show them a pretty G spinner to compensate, because research shows that'll make them think it's fast" irks me to no end.

markdog12 6y ago
Here's a couple of tabs, one is a dashboard taking up 1.5GB RAM, the other is a k8s deployment page, taking up 1GB. It seems any tab takes up a ton of RAM. CPU also locks up completely in those tabs routinely. The chance that occurs correlates with how long a tab is open. https://imgur.com/a/i9L45ZM https://imgur.com/a/i9L45ZM

datavirtue 6y ago

Thirty years ago grandpa always said I should dev on the slowest machine we have.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]