3 ms·
How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? We could do a huge amount if we'd give every mainline
by Syonyk 5y ago
How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs?
We could do a huge amount if we'd give every mainline tech company engineer a Raspberry Pi 4, and shut down their big workstations for a week a month, making them live on a mere quad core 1.5GHz chip with 8GB of RAM.
I'm sick and tired of how every shiny new "update" of web applications uses more and more CPU, runs slower and slower, and, gosh, you'd better buy a new computer to run it.
I've ranted before on my blog about the horrible things Google did to the Blogger interface - a text editing interface. For reasons I don't care enough to dig into, the "new" interface forced on everyone last year has some dependency on number of photos such that if you have too many photos, or too slow a system, you get massive, massive lag in entering text. It's literally unusable on plenty of systems that used to run the older interfaces, and you can choke out a fairly high end system by putting enough photos (100-200?) in a post. Even a dozen or so will choke out older systems that used to run the old interface fine.
But, hey, it's no problem for the Googlers who wrote it and tested it on their high end 2 year old Xeon workstations! Worked great for their toy cases, and having not actually talked to anyone who uses Blogger, ship it and get your promotion, having ruined the interface for anyone with older or lower power hardware.
The new Google Chat interface I've been migrated to is similarly painful on a Pi4. It only takes 20 seconds to load and then maybe a similar amount of time to load an actual conversation. Snappy on a M1 Mini, though, so who cares, right?
Once it's actually loaded, it's tolerable (the usual slight lag in text entry that any Google app on a Pi4 has), but getting it loaded is quite painful, and Hangouts used to work just fine.
- whatisthiseven 5y ago> How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? Sure, a nice goal, but the Internet consumes maybe 10% of the world's electricity, and I highly doubt that is because of slow webpages. It is also "fairly easy" to green datacenter electrical usage because only the generation source need be changed, as opposed to replacing billions of cars, or even entire industrial practices like cement that give off CO2 as waste byproduct. All of which are in excess of 50% of total electrical usage. That, and we have to convert our powerplants anyway. Lastly, my understanding of slow webpages is largely IO and latency, not compute, which further reduces the link between slow pages and electrical usage.
- dang 5y ago"Please don't fulminate." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I understand and share the frustration, but generic indignant rants like this don't improve HN threads, especially when they're off topic and get repeated a ton, as this one is and does. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...