6 ms·

I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM. Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip a

I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM. Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB RAM just to run a chat app reliably. Where did we go wrong?

dmonitor 4y ago
I will never miss skype. that application was a buggy ass POS near the end.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I meant the pre-Microsoft Skype. That one was magic. It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!). Can present day Discord do that?
- inetknght 4y ago
  > skype was a buggy ass POS near the end. Skype was great at first. Then Microsoft bought Skype and turned it into a shithole. Then Microsoft said that this product is trash and migrated everyone to use MSN. Thanks, Microsoft!
yamtaddle 4y ago
They ran fine on machines a hell of a lot weaker than that. If you had an actually-good desktop OS (uh, BeOS is the only example I know of—Linux, at the time, couldn't do this, even with minimalist window managers) you could even browse the web, have chat open, and be playing mp3s, and not hear so much as a pop or skip on the music, on a 166MHz Pentium (that's a single core, kiddos) with 128MB (luxury!) of memory.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs. ... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      > Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then. Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)
- rascul 4y ago
  Linux could do that fine. Not sure why it couldn't for you but with similar hardware in the mid to late '90s I was able to listen to mp3s, browse the web, and chat on IRC at the same time with no issues.
deathanatos 4y ago
I don't knit, but none of those do what Discord does, really: effective group chat + in game voice. Skype is sort of is in that direction, but Discord's UX nails it for in-game chat whereas Skype's did not. (Though it has been a while since I ran Skype for more than "oh, that's the only medium that party supports? I guess if we have to…") I do feel that these apps these days, Discord included, eat a ton of resources, and that it feels like a regression.
Zetobal 4y ago
ripcord is basically what you are looking for it works with slack and discord.
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/ https://www.electronjs.org/. I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  VSCode is an Electron application and yet, while not being lightweight, snappy and efficient, is not a complete piece of garbage. I think the blame fully falls on the developers of such applications, not on the framework.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    That seems like the exception that proves the rule to me. If every electron application is a bloated CPU/memory hog that ignores the OS conventions, save the one with major corporate resources backing it, that tells me that making electron apps not suck is out of the reach of most developers, and such a thing is probably inherent to the framework.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Also it's important to note that MS makes bit only the best performing electron app (VSCode) but also the worst (Teams). So even with MS' billions it's not guaranteed to become a quality product. Strange enough they're now touting the move to Edge WebView as the solution (since they finally acknowledge how bad Teams is) but never explained how this will solve the problem as it's just the same tech (chromium) underneath.
      - freeone3000 4y ago
        It's able to share one instance of the browser engine across multiple apps (the way that Chrome is able to share one instance across multiple web pages). It'll help some, but won't make up for whatever the hell react is doing all the time.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Skype was always a bloated mess. My gaming/friend group started off with it, but between the hard cutoff at 8? 16? people in a call, Skype taking up approximately half of our typically 4 GB of RAM, and people discovering you could crash people's clients by sending them several GB of ;) emoticons which, when rendered into smiley images, would overwhelm most anybody's computer, we ended up switching to Mumble, where we discovered something else Skype had sucked at: audio quality. Mumble took less bandwidth and less system resources, while sounding like someone actually sitting in the room with you (at least to our phone-and-skype adjusted ears).
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I beg to differ and strongly disagree. Pre-Microsoft Skype was a genius invention and performed admirably for the time (~2005) considering how limited PC specs and bandwidth were back then. It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!). There were no better alternatives at the time.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    hmm. My experience with it was ~2010-ish? Mumble came out in 2005, too. Can't say for certain when we switch to Mumble, but it looks like they've had some codex changes over time.

dmonitor 4y ago

I will never miss skype. that application was a buggy ass POS near the end.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I meant the pre-Microsoft Skype. That one was magic. It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!). Can present day Discord do that?
inetknght 4y ago
> skype was a buggy ass POS near the end. Skype was great at first. Then Microsoft bought Skype and turned it into a shithole. Then Microsoft said that this product is trash and migrated everyone to use MSN. Thanks, Microsoft!

yamtaddle 4y ago

They ran fine on machines a hell of a lot weaker than that. If you had an actually-good desktop OS (uh, BeOS is the only example I know of—Linux, at the time, couldn't do this, even with minimalist window managers) you could even browse the web, have chat open, and be playing mp3s, and not hear so much as a pop or skip on the music, on a 166MHz Pentium (that's a single core, kiddos) with 128MB (luxury!) of memory.

mnw21cam 4y ago
I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs. ... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    > Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then. Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)
rascul 4y ago
Linux could do that fine. Not sure why it couldn't for you but with similar hardware in the mid to late '90s I was able to listen to mp3s, browse the web, and chat on IRC at the same time with no issues.

deathanatos 4y ago

I don't knit, but none of those do what Discord does, really: effective group chat + in game voice. Skype is sort of is in that direction, but Discord's UX nails it for in-game chat whereas Skype's did not. (Though it has been a while since I ran Skype for more than "oh, that's the only medium that party supports? I guess if we have to…") I do feel that these apps these days, Discord included, eat a ton of resources, and that it feels like a regression.

Zetobal 4y ago

ripcord is basically what you are looking for it works with slack and discord.

PathOfEclipse 4y ago

We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/ https://www.electronjs.org/. I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.

gpderetta 4y ago
VSCode is an Electron application and yet, while not being lightweight, snappy and efficient, is not a complete piece of garbage. I think the blame fully falls on the developers of such applications, not on the framework.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  That seems like the exception that proves the rule to me. If every electron application is a bloated CPU/memory hog that ignores the OS conventions, save the one with major corporate resources backing it, that tells me that making electron apps not suck is out of the reach of most developers, and such a thing is probably inherent to the framework.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Also it's important to note that MS makes bit only the best performing electron app (VSCode) but also the worst (Teams). So even with MS' billions it's not guaranteed to become a quality product. Strange enough they're now touting the move to Edge WebView as the solution (since they finally acknowledge how bad Teams is) but never explained how this will solve the problem as it's just the same tech (chromium) underneath.
    - freeone3000 4y ago
      It's able to share one instance of the browser engine across multiple apps (the way that Chrome is able to share one instance across multiple web pages). It'll help some, but won't make up for whatever the hell react is doing all the time.
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

Skype was always a bloated mess. My gaming/friend group started off with it, but between the hard cutoff at 8? 16? people in a call, Skype taking up approximately half of our typically 4 GB of RAM, and people discovering you could crash people's clients by sending them several GB of ;) emoticons which, when rendered into smiley images, would overwhelm most anybody's computer, we ended up switching to Mumble, where we discovered something else Skype had sucked at: audio quality. Mumble took less bandwidth and less system resources, while sounding like someone actually sitting in the room with you (at least to our phone-and-skype adjusted ears).

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I beg to differ and strongly disagree. Pre-Microsoft Skype was a genius invention and performed admirably for the time (~2005) considering how limited PC specs and bandwidth were back then. It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!). There were no better alternatives at the time.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  hmm. My experience with it was ~2010-ish? Mumble came out in 2005, too. Can't say for certain when we switch to Mumble, but it looks like they've had some codex changes over time.