12 ms·

I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. 144 Hz monitor? 4k? We got you covered. Even ray tracing and VR is on the way. Most games render

I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. 144 Hz monitor? 4k? We got you covered. Even ray tracing and VR is on the way. Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger. If you optimize those websites, they run super fast though, but it's quite a pain to do with the dependency bloat in modern tech stacks... (note: games lag as well when you drag in a million dependencies you don't need) The thing is, most sites and web apps try to solve a user problem, and if you are the only company in town that solves that problem, then performance barely matters - what matters is solving the problem. The users will put up with some pain because the problem is even more painful. With games, it's all about the experience of interacting with the software - so performance is (hopefully, depending on your team and budget) amazing. That, and... performance tuning is hard work, and I think most people don't know much about it. It's a fractal rabbit hole. Cache misses, garbage collection, streaming, object pooling, dealing with stale pointers, etc. Even I have a ton to learn, and no matter how much I learn, I probably still will have a lot more to learn. It's easier for many teams to hand wave it I guess as long as they aren't losing too many customers because of it.

dbttdft 4y ago
> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. I'm a game developer (and player) and I strongly disagree. What game can even do P95 144FPS on affordable hardware? On lowest graphics, with populated lobbies (there also can't be a that ONE map where this all goes to shit). And are we talking about AAA games or not? Because non-AAA means a minecraft knockoff cannot meet 60FPS.
bradgessler 4y ago
Websites can def be fast, but to your point it’s a priority problem. This comparison I made at https://legiblenews.com/speed https://legiblenews.com/speed that got upvoted here a while back shows just that—most news websites care about ads first before their users speed experience. Only Legible News, USA Today, and Financial Times have a reasonable speed score, which is kind of depressing.
bofh23 4y ago
> and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger. Why don’t browsers mask out events during render of page regions or note their time and bounding boxes so click events reach the correct element? Steps to reproduce this annoyance: - visit Twitter mobile site: mobile.twitter.com in Safari on a slow iPhone (eg iPhone 6 stuck on iOS 12.X). - scroll and view tweets for a while soaking up memory. - visit a tweet - press tweet share icon - popup menu takes forever to render fully to include the Cancel button. - clicking Bookmark tweet menu item will trigger item after that, Copy Link to Tweet, when it finally loads and moves that menu item under your finger.
agumonkey 4y ago
The 3d world has long been a curious space to me. Even in late 90s, and early GPUs, you knew how responsive things were compared to 2d applications. It was hard to reconcile in my head.
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  In my opinion it's because games are art, and art is about feeling. I made a browser game, and recently optimized it heavily. Now it loads a game and huge 3D area in 2-3 seconds, faster than most mainstream websites. Like grandparent said, it is possible...and in art, how something feels is a priority.
Test0129 4y ago
I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB every time I want to play something. The size has gotten absurd.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of total storage these are similar. I'm not sure how the download rate of 70GB compares to the read speed of a CD but installs took a while back in the day as well.
  - throwaway744678 4y ago
    "Patch day, no play!"
  - TylerE 4y ago
    I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
  - 314 4y ago
    I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
    - BackBlast 4y ago
toast0 4y ago
> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load Most (many?) games take minutes to load. Perf is nice once they're loaded (assuming you've got sufficient hardware), but loading is a drag. Modern load times are worse than all the fiddling it took to get NES games to start.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but games have thousands of little cores generating those frames every 17ms, but websites usually rely on a big slow cpu to direct the workflow of tiny packets from some far off network, no?
  - LtdJorge 4y ago
    Yeah, but the list of things to render still has to be presented to the GPU in less than that time, from the CPU (draw call).
  - account42 4y ago
    Games also rely on the CPU to do simulation and feed the GPU. And Browsers also use the GPU for the actual rendering where possible.
- dllthomas 4y ago
  And for the love of God, if it's a single player game let me pause while it's loading (which shouldn't interrupt the loading, but should make it start in a paused state).
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Maybe on consoles. The only PC games I've played in the last decade that took minutes have been GTA5, Destiny 2, and heavily modded Minecraft. Most games load in under 15 seconds.
  - Toutouxc 4y ago
    Subnautica takes ages to load.
onion2k 4y ago
most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger The problem with remarks like this is that if this was really your experience of using the web you'd have installed an ad blocker years ago, and you wouldn't make that argument now. Consequently either it's easily dismiasable as hyperbole or you're a masochist who enjoys terrible websites. There are bad websites. It isn't "most websites" though. Just like some games drop frames horribly, but not "most games".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  I'm using an ad blocker, and with a cold cache, clicking a Twitter link shows a blue bird for a second, then two blue spinners (center and top) and then after 3 or 4 more seconds I can finally see a message that's a maximum of 280 characters long. News sites don't load much faster. Pages like HN are the exception, and mostly come from the tech corner. I've been on some brand's online store a few days ago and it felt like they want to drive customers away. But fair enough, it might not actually be most websites, but enough to not be a rare experience either.
  - viridian 4y ago
    I just checked twitter's network log on a single tweet by John Carmack. - 131 network calls - 280 kilobytes of data received - 4500ms total network time Thankfully, the vast majority of other websites aren't nearly this bad, but we're trending towards twitter as an industry, not away from it. I try to write API calls that provide broadband utility and return lightning fast by always making sure my critical path gets a fair shake for optimization, but I know there exist calls out there in react land that take my 220ms response and spend an extra 7 seconds transforming it to populate a (paginated) table on the UI.
    - 4y ago
KronisLV 4y ago
> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. It could be, if users would have more control over the graphics settings of the games that they want to play and they were allowed to scale back further to accommodate older hardware. For example, the Unity engine by default has a setting to allow downscaling the texture resolution that the game will use 2X, 4X and 8X, yet many games out there actually disable that. Same for some options menus not having framerate limits, dynamic render resolutions (though most engines support that functionality in one way or the other), particle density/soft particle options, options to disable SSAO/HBAO or other post processing like that, as well as enabling/disabling tessellation. The end result is that many games that could run passably on integrated graphics or hardware from a few generations ago (e.g. GTX 650 Ti) instead struggle greatly, because the people behind the game either didn't care or didn't want to allow it to ever look "bad" in their pursuit of mostly consistent graphical quality (and thus how the game will look in the videos/screenshots out there). The only real exception to this are e-sports titles, something like CS:GO is optimized really well for performing across a variety of hardware, while also giving the user the controls over how the game will look (and run). Games like DOOM are also a good example, but they're generally the exception, because most don't care about such technical excellence (though it's useful when you try porting the game to something like Nintendo Switch). Most other games don't give you that ability, just because they try to always do more stuff, which isn't that different from Wirth's law (software gets slower as hardware gets faster). Of course, this is also prevalent in indie titles, many of which don't even have proper LOD setups, because engines like Unity don't automatically generate LOD models and something like Godot 3 didn't even have any sort of LOD functionality out of the box. Engines like Unreal might make this better with Nanite, except that most people will use it for shoving more details into the games (bloating install sizes a bit), instead of as a really good LOD solution. That said, Godot 4 is also headed in the right direction and even for Godot 3 there are plugins (even though it's just like Unity, where you still need to make the models yourself), for which I actually ported the LOD plugin from GDScript to C#: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugin-from-gdscript-to-c https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugi...
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  How prevalent is a lack of graphics options really? To me it’s an expected piece of functionality in a PC build and in most games the first place I go to and turn DoF and motion blur off!
thefz 4y ago
> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that I know what you want to say (and I agree), but... website rendering depends on the network mostly, 16ms latency is already the top 0.5% of fiber users and you have to add that on top of every new connection... GPU rendering happens on a bus that is thousands of times faster, and it needs to cover a minuscule distance. You can't really compare the two.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Agreed. Why is it taking my garden hose so long to fill my swimming pool when tsunamis can do it in a matter of milliseconds? Differences in order of magnitude. That said, websites and even web apps really should be faster.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  I have 1 ms latency to 1.1.1.1 and a 10 gbps connection - faster than a SATA SSD - and most websites are still slow.
  - LtdJorge 4y ago
    That's the protocol and dependencies. Game assets are sequential and can be paralllelized most times.
  - thefz 4y ago
    Bandwidth =/= latency, and congrats, you are a very small percent.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I mention both independently. And the point is that transport is not the bottleneck.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
True, although even without ads nor a bloated stack, you start with network latency, code running in a VM that has to use hardware with terrible embedded gpu, accessibility requirements, seo, and so the obligation to use the dom api, the latter not being accessible throught a compiled language. Also, the website teams is usually smaller, and have a 10th of the time to ship. But it doesn't excuse everything, for sure. Most websites should be fast given how little they do.
tpxl 4y ago
> That, and... performance tuning is hard work Most 'performance tuning' out there is eliminating quadratic functions and putting stuff into simple dictionary caches. This should be easily teachable to any competent developer. The problem isn't 'hard work', it's nobody cares about this.
- otikik 4y ago
  That is not the lowest hanging fruit (where I would put trivial changes like inlining functions or switching an of-the-shelf library by a faster alternative). But it is medium-low hanging fruit. Getting measurements that help you identify where the bottlenecks really are can take time. Often these have to be retrofitted into existing complex system, when the project is already underway. Sometimes the only way forward is replacing the current way of doing things with a more efficient way of doing things. This requires understanding the current way well (it can be the result of many teams working together for months) as well as coming up with a new design. Both of these things take time. Finally, there's bug hunting, where you get into rabbit holes. "There's a slowdown when we're on this particular step. You investigate for days, until you realize that the slowdown only happens when the user mouse is near a section of the screen. It turns out that there's a non-visible UI element that should be inactive but it isn't because it is a custom element instead of one provided by the UI library, and it is attempting to render a special effect but finds no graphical context, so it request for a new context once per frame." And one week of dev time has passed.
- Xeamek 4y ago
  Yes, last part of performance tuning is relatively simple process as you described, but that's only because apps where performance matters are developed from the ground app with performance in mind, so entire architecture is designed in a way that supports performance. Now try to take some React developer that has been working for years in completely different abstraction level, and help him design more performant code base. You really think all you will talk about are cache misses?
  - aastronaut 4y ago
    no, but you can definitely talk about it. i also had a chat with a C++ dev that created a "Database"-class abstraction for our MongoDB instance and implemented methods to access each field of every documents separately - didn't care about side-effects, didn't know about ACID transactions and didn't care. finding a good abstraction that allows for performance tuning later on is hard, no matter the language, and react devs should make use of good abstractions as well.
alrlroipsp 4y ago
> (note: games lag as well when you drag in a million dependencies you don't need) No they don't. Your compiler will eliminate dead code.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  It think the implication was that the dep is used but not actually needed.
  - alrlroipsp 4y ago
    That is a flattering interpretation. Parent did write that "game lags as well when you drag in a million dependencies". That is hard for me to interpret like you did.
fyvhbhn 4y ago
Optimizing Websites is easy: turn on an ad locker. I was surprised how my fans of my pc went up once I turned off uBlock Origin once
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Older readers will remember when you'd buy a computer magazine printed on paper and at least 80% of it was ads. Which often didn't change from month to month. Massive slabs of wood pulp had to be printed and shipped to all to the stores that stocked them, at huge cost, just so you could manhandle one of them home. And the content was mostly physical bloat. That's the modern web. Except that you don't just get the ads, you get some of the machinery that serves them - at you, specifically, based on your browsing profile, which is used to decide which ads you see. I always refuse all cookies. When I forget to do that for some reason it's obvious just how much slower the experience gets.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > That's the modern web. Harsh but true.
- culi 4y ago
  You don't have uBlock Origin running?
madeofpalk 4y ago
> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat Well now, "most games" will take longer than 3-7 seconds to load. That's fair - they're doing a lot more than websites! Most websites also render frames in less than 17ms.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  When I'm working on a web project, like my "PlotBinder" WIP, I spend way more time trying to hit 60fps than I do in my game(s). Adding little css animations or transparent overlays cut the framerate down to 40fps on my old laptop until I tinkered for a while with it and made some compromises. The way pages render on the web is finnicky to optimize for.
docmars 4y ago
Figma is an excellent example of performance being a top priority to set themselves apart, since they weren't the only player in town at the time. We had Adobe Illustrator, XD was still in beta phases, and Sketch for macOS was showing signs of bloat and major performance hangups in any considerably realistic document. Affinity Designer was also coming into the scene with stellar performance, but had a high learning curve and wasn't well suited for interactive prototyping. Figma swooped in and solved 3 problems: 1. Availability in the browser on any platform, where native apps can't reach (and thus 10x easier sharing of documents). 2. Incredible performance on first release through their WebGL renderer, rivaling all of the native apps listed above. 3. Stayed flexible, and yet, barebones enough to get at least 80% of a designer's needs covered initially. Performance (and stability) were primarily what won me over to it, and I'd argue probably the same for many who switched over.
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  Illustrator's bad performance amazes me. I don't know about newer releases, but CC 2020 is basically single-threaded for everything. It's crazy to see it wait for 8 seconds to make a png vectorial, while using 5% CPU on a 16 core 3950x.
  - docmars 4y ago
    Bingo! That about sums up my memories of using it every since it went CC-anything. I think CS5 was the last version I used that felt pleasantly performant -- and on older machines, no less (2013 Macbook Air w/ i7, 16GB).

dbttdft 4y ago

> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. I'm a game developer (and player) and I strongly disagree. What game can even do P95 144FPS on affordable hardware? On lowest graphics, with populated lobbies (there also can't be a that ONE map where this all goes to shit). And are we talking about AAA games or not? Because non-AAA means a minecraft knockoff cannot meet 60FPS.

bradgessler 4y ago

Websites can def be fast, but to your point it’s a priority problem. This comparison I made at https://legiblenews.com/speed https://legiblenews.com/speed that got upvoted here a while back shows just that—most news websites care about ads first before their users speed experience. Only Legible News, USA Today, and Financial Times have a reasonable speed score, which is kind of depressing.

bofh23 4y ago

> and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger. Why don’t browsers mask out events during render of page regions or note their time and bounding boxes so click events reach the correct element? Steps to reproduce this annoyance: - visit Twitter mobile site: mobile.twitter.com in Safari on a slow iPhone (eg iPhone 6 stuck on iOS 12.X). - scroll and view tweets for a while soaking up memory. - visit a tweet - press tweet share icon - popup menu takes forever to render fully to include the Cancel button. - clicking Bookmark tweet menu item will trigger item after that, Copy Link to Tweet, when it finally loads and moves that menu item under your finger.

agumonkey 4y ago

The 3d world has long been a curious space to me. Even in late 90s, and early GPUs, you knew how responsive things were compared to 2d applications. It was hard to reconcile in my head.

EarthLaunch 4y ago
In my opinion it's because games are art, and art is about feeling. I made a browser game, and recently optimized it heavily. Now it loads a game and huge 3D area in 2-3 seconds, faster than most mainstream websites. Like grandparent said, it is possible...and in art, how something feels is a priority.

Test0129 4y ago

I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB every time I want to play something. The size has gotten absurd.

forgotusername6 4y ago
My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of total storage these are similar. I'm not sure how the download rate of 70GB compares to the read speed of a CD but installs took a while back in the day as well.
- throwaway744678 4y ago
  "Patch day, no play!"
- TylerE 4y ago
  I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
- 314 4y ago
  I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
  - BackBlast 4y ago

toast0 4y ago

> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load Most (many?) games take minutes to load. Perf is nice once they're loaded (assuming you've got sufficient hardware), but loading is a drag. Modern load times are worse than all the fiddling it took to get NES games to start.

7speter 4y ago
Definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but games have thousands of little cores generating those frames every 17ms, but websites usually rely on a big slow cpu to direct the workflow of tiny packets from some far off network, no?
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  Yeah, but the list of things to render still has to be presented to the GPU in less than that time, from the CPU (draw call).
- account42 4y ago
  Games also rely on the CPU to do simulation and feed the GPU. And Browsers also use the GPU for the actual rendering where possible.
dllthomas 4y ago
And for the love of God, if it's a single player game let me pause while it's loading (which shouldn't interrupt the loading, but should make it start in a paused state).
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Maybe on consoles. The only PC games I've played in the last decade that took minutes have been GTA5, Destiny 2, and heavily modded Minecraft. Most games load in under 15 seconds.
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  Subnautica takes ages to load.

onion2k 4y ago

most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger The problem with remarks like this is that if this was really your experience of using the web you'd have installed an ad blocker years ago, and you wouldn't make that argument now. Consequently either it's easily dismiasable as hyperbole or you're a masochist who enjoys terrible websites. There are bad websites. It isn't "most websites" though. Just like some games drop frames horribly, but not "most games".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iforgotpassword 4y ago
I'm using an ad blocker, and with a cold cache, clicking a Twitter link shows a blue bird for a second, then two blue spinners (center and top) and then after 3 or 4 more seconds I can finally see a message that's a maximum of 280 characters long. News sites don't load much faster. Pages like HN are the exception, and mostly come from the tech corner. I've been on some brand's online store a few days ago and it felt like they want to drive customers away. But fair enough, it might not actually be most websites, but enough to not be a rare experience either.
- viridian 4y ago
  I just checked twitter's network log on a single tweet by John Carmack. - 131 network calls - 280 kilobytes of data received - 4500ms total network time Thankfully, the vast majority of other websites aren't nearly this bad, but we're trending towards twitter as an industry, not away from it. I try to write API calls that provide broadband utility and return lightning fast by always making sure my critical path gets a fair shake for optimization, but I know there exist calls out there in react land that take my 220ms response and spend an extra 7 seconds transforming it to populate a (paginated) table on the UI.
  - 4y ago

KronisLV 4y ago

> I'm a game developer and game performance is better than ever. It could be, if users would have more control over the graphics settings of the games that they want to play and they were allowed to scale back further to accommodate older hardware. For example, the Unity engine by default has a setting to allow downscaling the texture resolution that the game will use 2X, 4X and 8X, yet many games out there actually disable that. Same for some options menus not having framerate limits, dynamic render resolutions (though most engines support that functionality in one way or the other), particle density/soft particle options, options to disable SSAO/HBAO or other post processing like that, as well as enabling/disabling tessellation. The end result is that many games that could run passably on integrated graphics or hardware from a few generations ago (e.g. GTX 650 Ti) instead struggle greatly, because the people behind the game either didn't care or didn't want to allow it to ever look "bad" in their pursuit of mostly consistent graphical quality (and thus how the game will look in the videos/screenshots out there). The only real exception to this are e-sports titles, something like CS:GO is optimized really well for performing across a variety of hardware, while also giving the user the controls over how the game will look (and run). Games like DOOM are also a good example, but they're generally the exception, because most don't care about such technical excellence (though it's useful when you try porting the game to something like Nintendo Switch). Most other games don't give you that ability, just because they try to always do more stuff, which isn't that different from Wirth's law (software gets slower as hardware gets faster). Of course, this is also prevalent in indie titles, many of which don't even have proper LOD setups, because engines like Unity don't automatically generate LOD models and something like Godot 3 didn't even have any sort of LOD functionality out of the box. Engines like Unreal might make this better with Nanite, except that most people will use it for shoving more details into the games (bloating install sizes a bit), instead of as a really good LOD solution. That said, Godot 4 is also headed in the right direction and even for Godot 3 there are plugins (even though it's just like Unity, where you still need to make the models yourself), for which I actually ported the LOD plugin from GDScript to C#: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugin-from-gdscript-to-c https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/porting-the-godot-lod-plugi...

meheleventyone 4y ago
How prevalent is a lack of graphics options really? To me it’s an expected piece of functionality in a PC build and in most games the first place I go to and turn DoF and motion blur off!

thefz 4y ago

> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that I know what you want to say (and I agree), but... website rendering depends on the network mostly, 16ms latency is already the top 0.5% of fiber users and you have to add that on top of every new connection... GPU rendering happens on a bus that is thousands of times faster, and it needs to cover a minuscule distance. You can't really compare the two.

christophilus 4y ago
Agreed. Why is it taking my garden hose so long to fill my swimming pool when tsunamis can do it in a matter of milliseconds? Differences in order of magnitude. That said, websites and even web apps really should be faster.
zbrozek 4y ago
I have 1 ms latency to 1.1.1.1 and a 10 gbps connection - faster than a SATA SSD - and most websites are still slow.
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  That's the protocol and dependencies. Game assets are sequential and can be paralllelized most times.
- thefz 4y ago
  Bandwidth =/= latency, and congrats, you are a very small percent.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I mention both independently. And the point is that transport is not the bottleneck.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

True, although even without ads nor a bloated stack, you start with network latency, code running in a VM that has to use hardware with terrible embedded gpu, accessibility requirements, seo, and so the obligation to use the dom api, the latter not being accessible throught a compiled language. Also, the website teams is usually smaller, and have a 10th of the time to ship. But it doesn't excuse everything, for sure. Most websites should be fast given how little they do.

tpxl 4y ago

> That, and... performance tuning is hard work Most 'performance tuning' out there is eliminating quadratic functions and putting stuff into simple dictionary caches. This should be easily teachable to any competent developer. The problem isn't 'hard work', it's nobody cares about this.

otikik 4y ago
That is not the lowest hanging fruit (where I would put trivial changes like inlining functions or switching an of-the-shelf library by a faster alternative). But it is medium-low hanging fruit. Getting measurements that help you identify where the bottlenecks really are can take time. Often these have to be retrofitted into existing complex system, when the project is already underway. Sometimes the only way forward is replacing the current way of doing things with a more efficient way of doing things. This requires understanding the current way well (it can be the result of many teams working together for months) as well as coming up with a new design. Both of these things take time. Finally, there's bug hunting, where you get into rabbit holes. "There's a slowdown when we're on this particular step. You investigate for days, until you realize that the slowdown only happens when the user mouse is near a section of the screen. It turns out that there's a non-visible UI element that should be inactive but it isn't because it is a custom element instead of one provided by the UI library, and it is attempting to render a special effect but finds no graphical context, so it request for a new context once per frame." And one week of dev time has passed.
Xeamek 4y ago
Yes, last part of performance tuning is relatively simple process as you described, but that's only because apps where performance matters are developed from the ground app with performance in mind, so entire architecture is designed in a way that supports performance. Now try to take some React developer that has been working for years in completely different abstraction level, and help him design more performant code base. You really think all you will talk about are cache misses?
- aastronaut 4y ago
  no, but you can definitely talk about it. i also had a chat with a C++ dev that created a "Database"-class abstraction for our MongoDB instance and implemented methods to access each field of every documents separately - didn't care about side-effects, didn't know about ACID transactions and didn't care. finding a good abstraction that allows for performance tuning later on is hard, no matter the language, and react devs should make use of good abstractions as well.

alrlroipsp 4y ago

> (note: games lag as well when you drag in a million dependencies you don't need) No they don't. Your compiler will eliminate dead code.

gpderetta 4y ago
It think the implication was that the dep is used but not actually needed.
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  That is a flattering interpretation. Parent did write that "game lags as well when you drag in a million dependencies". That is hard for me to interpret like you did.

fyvhbhn 4y ago

Optimizing Websites is easy: turn on an ad locker. I was surprised how my fans of my pc went up once I turned off uBlock Origin once

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Older readers will remember when you'd buy a computer magazine printed on paper and at least 80% of it was ads. Which often didn't change from month to month. Massive slabs of wood pulp had to be printed and shipped to all to the stores that stocked them, at huge cost, just so you could manhandle one of them home. And the content was mostly physical bloat. That's the modern web. Except that you don't just get the ads, you get some of the machinery that serves them - at you, specifically, based on your browsing profile, which is used to decide which ads you see. I always refuse all cookies. When I forget to do that for some reason it's obvious just how much slower the experience gets.

rayiner 4y ago
> That's the modern web. Harsh but true.
culi 4y ago
You don't have uBlock Origin running?

madeofpalk 4y ago

> Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat Well now, "most games" will take longer than 3-7 seconds to load. That's fair - they're doing a lot more than websites! Most websites also render frames in less than 17ms.

barbariangrunge 4y ago
When I'm working on a web project, like my "PlotBinder" WIP, I spend way more time trying to hit 60fps than I do in my game(s). Adding little css animations or transparent overlays cut the framerate down to 40fps on my old laptop until I tinkered for a while with it and made some compromises. The way pages render on the web is finnicky to optimize for.

docmars 4y ago

Figma is an excellent example of performance being a top priority to set themselves apart, since they weren't the only player in town at the time. We had Adobe Illustrator, XD was still in beta phases, and Sketch for macOS was showing signs of bloat and major performance hangups in any considerably realistic document. Affinity Designer was also coming into the scene with stellar performance, but had a high learning curve and wasn't well suited for interactive prototyping. Figma swooped in and solved 3 problems: 1. Availability in the browser on any platform, where native apps can't reach (and thus 10x easier sharing of documents). 2. Incredible performance on first release through their WebGL renderer, rivaling all of the native apps listed above. 3. Stayed flexible, and yet, barebones enough to get at least 80% of a designer's needs covered initially. Performance (and stability) were primarily what won me over to it, and I'd argue probably the same for many who switched over.

LtdJorge 4y ago
Illustrator's bad performance amazes me. I don't know about newer releases, but CC 2020 is basically single-threaded for everything. It's crazy to see it wait for 8 seconds to make a png vectorial, while using 5% CPU on a 16 core 3950x.
- docmars 4y ago
  Bingo! That about sums up my memories of using it every since it went CC-anything. I think CS5 was the last version I used that felt pleasantly performant -- and on older machines, no less (2013 Macbook Air w/ i7, 16GB).