4 ms·

What's depressing is that these hardware specs are millions of times faster/more cores/more storage/more ram than 20 years ago but we still manage to produce la

What's depressing is that these hardware specs are millions of times faster/more cores/more storage/more ram than 20 years ago but we still manage to produce laggy applications and websites. How can something that should e.g. Visual Studio whose solution should easily fit into RAM take about 5 seconds to start, 5 seconds to search the MRU and 10+ seconds to load intellisense. How can "search the combo box" on Octopus deploy take notceable seconds sometimes even though it is purely an in-browser operation? That's just two examples, there are plenty of others. Sorry hardware guys!

ryanjshaw 4y ago
> 20 years ago This was published nearly 33 years ago: OUSTERHOUT, J. 1989. Why aren’t operating systems getting faster as fast as hardware? WRL Tech Note, (TN-11) https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-TN-11.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-TN-11.pdf
- lbriner 4y ago
  Some interesting parts, although issues related to memory bandwidth and disk IO are not as relevant today. I guess the most obvious parallel is that current OSs were designed for hardware that worked the way it did 30 years ago and now that those bottlenecks have disappeared, it is not trivial to rework the design to take advantage of these things. I suppose the OS suffers from the tragedy of the commons in that each application developer assumes access to enough RAM and CPU to just work without considering how their large resource usage might affect all other applications/services on the system.
Kerbonut 4y ago
How much latency does all of modern software’s telemetry add into that?
rbanffy 4y ago
> How can something that should e.g. Visual Studio whose solution should easily fit into RAM take about 5 seconds to start, 5 seconds to search the MRU and 10+ seconds to load intellisense. You could start all three in three threads and have everything finish in 10+ seconds, provided you have cores and memory bandwidth available. Maybe Microsoft is providing too good desktops for the Visual Studio team. ;-) I frequently advocate developers should, as an exercise, work on machines with more cores and lower single-thread performance. Core counts are only going to increase and being able to put all cores to work at the same time is an important competitive advantage.

ryanjshaw 4y ago

> 20 years ago This was published nearly 33 years ago: OUSTERHOUT, J. 1989. Why aren’t operating systems getting faster as fast as hardware? WRL Tech Note, (TN-11) https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-TN-11.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-TN-11.pdf

lbriner 4y ago
Some interesting parts, although issues related to memory bandwidth and disk IO are not as relevant today. I guess the most obvious parallel is that current OSs were designed for hardware that worked the way it did 30 years ago and now that those bottlenecks have disappeared, it is not trivial to rework the design to take advantage of these things. I suppose the OS suffers from the tragedy of the commons in that each application developer assumes access to enough RAM and CPU to just work without considering how their large resource usage might affect all other applications/services on the system.

Kerbonut 4y ago

How much latency does all of modern software’s telemetry add into that?

rbanffy 4y ago

> How can something that should e.g. Visual Studio whose solution should easily fit into RAM take about 5 seconds to start, 5 seconds to search the MRU and 10+ seconds to load intellisense. You could start all three in three threads and have everything finish in 10+ seconds, provided you have cores and memory bandwidth available. Maybe Microsoft is providing too good desktops for the Visual Studio team. ;-) I frequently advocate developers should, as an exercise, work on machines with more cores and lower single-thread performance. Core counts are only going to increase and being able to put all cores to work at the same time is an important competitive advantage.