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The problem is that your 8 year old ThinkPad is less powerful than a $300 smartphone. Electron will be using GPU rendering. What kind of GPU performance does

by Jonnax 5y ago

The problem is that your 8 year old ThinkPad is less powerful than a $300 smartphone. Electron will be using GPU rendering. What kind of GPU performance does your 8 year old laptop have? Probably a minimum of 5x less performance than a smart phone.

fouric 5y ago
> your 8 year old ThinkPad is less powerful than a $300 smartphone What does "more powerful" even mean? If you mean "better single-threaded CPU performance", I absolutely don't believe you. If you mean "better multi-threaded CPU performance", I might believe you, but would need evidence. Moreover, that's irrelevant. I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exclusively referring to desktop applications. Why would we be talking about running Electron on a smartphone? > Electron will be using GPU rendering. Sure. Can you show that CPU usage will still be low? In my experience with Electron applications on a newer laptop with decent graphics (can play Dota 2), CPU usage is still 15% of a single core while literally nothing is happening.
- Jonnax 5y ago
  A Samsung A51 is a budget phone: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-galaxy-a51-5g https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-galaxy... Similar performance to an average Haswell Laptop CPU. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-4600u https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-4600u Also it has the Intel 4000 series. This GPU lagged in rendering the windows desktop on 1080. Let alone with a dual monitor setup. It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone. Or a secondhand flagship. There needs to come a point where you accept that your hardware is crap not the software. Dota 2 is 7 years old. It wasn't decent graphics back in 2013. You may as well have said that the laptop runs minesweeper with decent graphics. Go load up Genshin Impact. It runs on smartphones, but I imagine might set your new laptop on fire. Why is your 15% thing the fault of electron? Microsoft teams is a crap application it's not the frameworks fault. I'd say the majority of shitty applications I've used is coded in Java. I've used plenty of enterprise tools that spit out the lovely error message "NullPointerException" Is it fair to say that all apps coded with Java is shit? But also where are you getting your 15% from?
  - fouric 5y ago
    Alright, I'll take your benchmarks. Thank you. However, it doesn't matter. > It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone. I literally pointed out exactly why it's irrelevant, and you completely ignored me. I'll point it out again: > I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exclusively referring to desktop applications. Comparing phones to laptops is an apples-to-oranges comparison. It doesn't matter if a low-end phone might be able to run an Electron app well, because we're not talking about low-end phones - the discussion in this thread, as well as almost every other thread that refers to "bloated Electron applications", is talking exclusively about desktops. If your "point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone", then your point is also irrelevant for the purposes of people talking about bloated Electron apps, because almost none of them are discussing phones. > There needs to come a point where you accept that your hardware is crap not the software. Yes, and 7-year-old hardware is not that point for these programs - maybe for ML training, but not chat apps. That point only occurs when hardware is slow enough that the algorithms needed to run the core functionality cannot run quickly on it. Software that does not make efficient use of its hardware is crap. Electron does not make efficient use of its hardware. Electron is either crap, or makes it so easy to write crap that it might as well be. There's a reason that you see people so often complaining about it, and that's because it's so inefficient that it causes a noticeably poor user experience, even for developers running on mid-range devices (which makes it far worse on low-end devices). As evidence, Ripcord[1] offers a substantial subset of the features of Discord and Slack[2] with significantly better performance. The fact that it's made by a single person and yet manages to significantly out-perform large teams of (ostensibly) competent engineers while still implementing the core functionality provides strong evidence that it is the framework's fault, because it's clearly not because those features are somehow intrinsically computationally expensive to implement. > I'd say the majority of shitty applications I've used is coded in Java. Yes, and I think that Java is a terrible platform, too, speaking from experience with Minecraft, GNU Electric, Netbeans, and Eclipse. That doesn't make Electron any less bad. > Is it fair to say that all apps coded with Java is shit? Nobody said that they (or Electron apps) are. All of the complaints that I've seen, including mine, is that Electron generally has terrible performance, strongly encourages bad performance, that all major applications built in it are slow, and while it might be possible to build fast tools in it, we haven't seen them. > But also where are you getting your 15% from? ...literally the CPU usage of Discord while it's running. [1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [2] https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features

by Jonnax 5y ago

fouric 5y ago

> your 8 year old ThinkPad is less powerful than a $300 smartphone What does "more powerful" even mean? If you mean "better single-threaded CPU performance", I absolutely don't believe you. If you mean "better multi-threaded CPU performance", I might believe you, but would need evidence. Moreover, that's irrelevant. I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exclusively referring to desktop applications. Why would we be talking about running Electron on a smartphone? > Electron will be using GPU rendering. Sure. Can you show that CPU usage will still be low? In my experience with Electron applications on a newer laptop with decent graphics (can play Dota 2), CPU usage is still 15% of a single core while literally nothing is happening.

Jonnax 5y ago
A Samsung A51 is a budget phone: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-galaxy-a51-5g https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-galaxy... Similar performance to an average Haswell Laptop CPU. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-4600u https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-4600u Also it has the Intel 4000 series. This GPU lagged in rendering the windows desktop on 1080. Let alone with a dual monitor setup. It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone. Or a secondhand flagship. There needs to come a point where you accept that your hardware is crap not the software. Dota 2 is 7 years old. It wasn't decent graphics back in 2013. You may as well have said that the laptop runs minesweeper with decent graphics. Go load up Genshin Impact. It runs on smartphones, but I imagine might set your new laptop on fire. Why is your 15% thing the fault of electron? Microsoft teams is a crap application it's not the frameworks fault. I'd say the majority of shitty applications I've used is coded in Java. I've used plenty of enterprise tools that spit out the lovely error message "NullPointerException" Is it fair to say that all apps coded with Java is shit? But also where are you getting your 15% from?
- fouric 5y ago
  Alright, I'll take your benchmarks. Thank you. However, it doesn't matter. > It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone. I literally pointed out exactly why it's irrelevant, and you completely ignored me. I'll point it out again: > I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exclusively referring to desktop applications. Comparing phones to laptops is an apples-to-oranges comparison. It doesn't matter if a low-end phone might be able to run an Electron app well, because we're not talking about low-end phones - the discussion in this thread, as well as almost every other thread that refers to "bloated Electron applications", is talking exclusively about desktops. If your "point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone", then your point is also irrelevant for the purposes of people talking about bloated Electron apps, because almost none of them are discussing phones. > There needs to come a point where you accept that your hardware is crap not the software. Yes, and 7-year-old hardware is not that point for these programs - maybe for ML training, but not chat apps. That point only occurs when hardware is slow enough that the algorithms needed to run the core functionality cannot run quickly on it. Software that does not make efficient use of its hardware is crap. Electron does not make efficient use of its hardware. Electron is either crap, or makes it so easy to write crap that it might as well be. There's a reason that you see people so often complaining about it, and that's because it's so inefficient that it causes a noticeably poor user experience, even for developers running on mid-range devices (which makes it far worse on low-end devices). As evidence, Ripcord[1] offers a substantial subset of the features of Discord and Slack[2] with significantly better performance. The fact that it's made by a single person and yet manages to significantly out-perform large teams of (ostensibly) competent engineers while still implementing the core functionality provides strong evidence that it is the framework's fault, because it's clearly not because those features are somehow intrinsically computationally expensive to implement. > I'd say the majority of shitty applications I've used is coded in Java. Yes, and I think that Java is a terrible platform, too, speaking from experience with Minecraft, GNU Electric, Netbeans, and Eclipse. That doesn't make Electron any less bad. > Is it fair to say that all apps coded with Java is shit? Nobody said that they (or Electron apps) are. All of the complaints that I've seen, including mine, is that Electron generally has terrible performance, strongly encourages bad performance, that all major applications built in it are slow, and while it might be possible to build fast tools in it, we haven't seen them. > But also where are you getting your 15% from? ...literally the CPU usage of Discord while it's running. [1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [2] https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features