3 ms·

I remember waiting almost two minutes for Netscape Navigator to start.

by themitigating 4y ago

treeman79 4y ago
Imagine that was probably limit on hard drive read speed
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  And low available RAM paired with a slow hard drive and memory swapping.
mod 4y ago
I was in middle school. We called it Nutscrape. It was abysmally slow, agreed. But it wasn't a simple piece of software, either. This sound recorder is. And I'll let an expert chime in here, but I think we're many orders of magnitude faster now, on the hardware side.
josephg 4y ago
I bet Netscape 2.0 would startup more or less instantly on modern hardware. Modern computers are so bonkers fast that everything should be instant on them. I mean, new CPUs can do 5 billion cycles per second, per core. To have an operation take 1 second, someone wrote software so slow that the computer took billions of steps to do something. How wild is that! Whenever you have to wait for things on modern computers, you’ve essentially been robbed.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  > 5 billion cycles per second IF everything is in the cache, there is no dependency on I/O, and cycles aren't wasted with context switching between usermode->kernel. Unless your program is purely computational it's going to burn cycles on system calls and I/O.
  - josephg 4y ago
    Your computer can do an awful lot of syscalls and IO in 1 second. And almost all of the network traffic and syscalls can be mitigated almost all of the time. Eg by caching, buffered IO, cutting out bloat, minifying javascript, static rendering, using lower res assets, and so on. There’s exceptions - AI, video games, rendering and simulations work can take real time. But other than that, modern computers should boot instantly, and apps should open instantly. Webpages should open within about 3x the server round trip time. There is very little software I’ve ever worked with that, with some effort, couldn’t be massively optimized.
masswerk 4y ago
Nothing to waiting for contemporary versions of Word to collect the fonts list…

I remember waiting almost two minutes for Netscape Navigator to start.

treeman79 4y ago

Imagine that was probably limit on hard drive read speed

Jtsummers 4y ago
And low available RAM paired with a slow hard drive and memory swapping.

mod 4y ago

I was in middle school. We called it Nutscrape. It was abysmally slow, agreed. But it wasn't a simple piece of software, either. This sound recorder is. And I'll let an expert chime in here, but I think we're many orders of magnitude faster now, on the hardware side.

josephg 4y ago

I bet Netscape 2.0 would startup more or less instantly on modern hardware. Modern computers are so bonkers fast that everything should be instant on them. I mean, new CPUs can do 5 billion cycles per second, per core. To have an operation take 1 second, someone wrote software so slow that the computer took billions of steps to do something. How wild is that! Whenever you have to wait for things on modern computers, you’ve essentially been robbed.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
> 5 billion cycles per second IF everything is in the cache, there is no dependency on I/O, and cycles aren't wasted with context switching between usermode->kernel. Unless your program is purely computational it's going to burn cycles on system calls and I/O.
- josephg 4y ago
  Your computer can do an awful lot of syscalls and IO in 1 second. And almost all of the network traffic and syscalls can be mitigated almost all of the time. Eg by caching, buffered IO, cutting out bloat, minifying javascript, static rendering, using lower res assets, and so on. There’s exceptions - AI, video games, rendering and simulations work can take real time. But other than that, modern computers should boot instantly, and apps should open instantly. Webpages should open within about 3x the server round trip time. There is very little software I’ve ever worked with that, with some effort, couldn’t be massively optimized.

masswerk 4y ago

Nothing to waiting for contemporary versions of Word to collect the fonts list…