4 ms·

I love calculations like this and hope they are part of every engineer’s line of thinking. I originally came across this thinking in Andy Hertzfeld’s book - htt

I love calculations like this and hope they are part of every engineer’s line of thinking. I originally came across this thinking in Andy Hertzfeld’s book - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt Performance is time, energy, heat. It’s one of the easiest features to get and there are lots of tools, research, and philosophies to help get it. Memory and storage are similar. For anyone working on large scale apps that are on millions of devices, hundreds of thousands of servers, or even just some back office guy who has minutes less stress in his day, performance benefits the world. For programmers, it’s one of the easiest ways to Save the Planet™.

harshreality 4y ago
How did the idea of avoiding premature optimization get misapplied to client-side apps where the entity writing the software is not the one paying for electricity, cooling, and people's time when the software takes much longer to run than it could? When did a lot of software devs stop caring? Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.
- rocqua 4y ago
  Premature optimization should be avoided client side as well I imagine? It just seems like lots of development shops skip optimization altogether, even when it stops being Premature (when it matures?). And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
- aranchelk 4y ago
  I use a 7 year old low-power laptop. Cooling, electricity usage, and performance of Electron apps are never an issue. Crashes, bugs, lost data, and bad usability still are. I’d rather have devs spend time on that stuff. If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.
  - harshreality 4y ago
    Not an issue for you, that you know of, because you have no equivalent software that's written in a more performant language (or at least critical portions of the codebase written in a more performant language). That's part of the problem; in most cases, software users don't know what life would be like with better software. They assume the performance they see is close to optimal, or at least that the devs made an effort to optimize. Users are willing to get used to whatever the software's performance is, in order to have access to the software's features. You can get used to almost anything, as suboptimal performance turns into background noise, but that doesn't mean you should. You get used to waiting 5 seconds for a piece of software to do something that you do on average once every hour or two, not realizing that those 5 seconds, 10 times a day, 365 days a year, cost you 5 hours every year. Optimizing performance and fixing crashes/bugs/dataloss aren't mutually exclusive, either. Developers who care less about code quality than checking boxes for features requested by management or customers, will write code that's both suboptimal and buggy.
    - aranchelk 4y ago
      > Not an issue for you, that you know of, because you have no equivalent software that's written in a more performant language How on earth would you know that? No, incorrect.
- zerkten 4y ago
  >> When did a lot of software devs stop caring? I'm not sure the devs stopped caring as much as the powers at be. Software development has become more commoditized than we want to believe. Devs following an agile workflow with every intent of performing multiple rounds of optimization find that the product gets shipped as soon as it approximates the thing that had been conceived originally. It doesn't look like an immediate failure, so the less that leadership takes from it is frequently that the level of maturity they shipped is safe. The cycle continues and eventually folks lower down succumb to this shipping pattern. The only things that get them to optimize is competition that successfully drive home their win was due to performance. This doesn't always lead to optimizations when you are an incumbent who can still close more feature gaps because those often result in higher sales and revenue.
RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
It can be a bit dangerous (especially to your employer) to continue that line of thinking, though. How many pieces of software do we collectively work on which would make the world a better place if they didn't exist at all?
- asoneth 4y ago
  Is that really a downside? In some cases you convince your organization to shift focus onto more useful products, and that can be a really great feeling. In other cases (company is too large, management too committed) it helps you confront exactly who you're working for. Because if you're going to sell your soul, you should at least make sure you're getting a good price.
- i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
  Meh. I feel like there needs to be an active movement to assess programs that have huge scale (>10m users) to identify unnecessary power usage - whether it be because of a bug, because of unused functionality that nonetheless takes resources, or intermediate steps that take unnecessary power. Perhaps I’m getting into a bit of a niche here, but the rise of stringy formats for data transfer concerns me. There are many-stage pipelines on machines that agree on what a 64 bit integer is, yet each stage performs encoding and decoding of JSON twice (decoding upon receipt, encoding to pass it on to the right place, decoding the response, encoding it in another manner to reply to the original sender). Sounds like a minor concern, but the scale of this instinctively feels like it’d dwarf 250MW globally.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Oh no! … anyway…
- josephg 4y ago
  If your job and your conscience disagree, quit your job. You only get one life and we have so many options as engineers. Why make the world worse for ourselves and our children when you have other options?
sseagull 4y ago
Don't forget the waste caused by people throwing away devices that are "too slow", and the resources required to build new computers/phones. Somewhere I saw a rough figure about phones. Something like: if everyone was able to keep their phone one year longer, it would be the equivalent of 600,000 cars off the road or something. (Just looked it up - source is possibly the founder of iFixit). But you know, development velocity or whatever.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Actually, in the PC/laptop space, I believe this phenomenon has been waning somewhat over the past... oh, the better part of a decade. This is a result of: * Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing * The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing. * Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and and an SSD) already, even with multiple applications open. .. and all of these had not been the case during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Now, if your machine's hardware doesn't brake down - and you're just a plain desktop user - your motivation for throwing away your machine is quite limited. --- Of course, this is not the case for smartphones, we're still on the roller-coaster there.
  - genocidicbunny 4y ago
    I would say we're coming to that point with phones too. Phones have also largely reached the end of their breakneck big-annual-improvement phase; There's little annual improvement in performance, power consumption, form factor or feature set. Screen resolutions are plenty high for most users, similar for the cameras. Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates.
    - rurp 4y ago
      > Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates. Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.
zerocrates 4y ago
There's a similar calculation (in a slightly different context) in a good scene in the movie Margin Call, about all the miles and hours saved by one bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g

harshreality 4y ago

How did the idea of avoiding premature optimization get misapplied to client-side apps where the entity writing the software is not the one paying for electricity, cooling, and people's time when the software takes much longer to run than it could? When did a lot of software devs stop caring? Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.

rocqua 4y ago
Premature optimization should be avoided client side as well I imagine? It just seems like lots of development shops skip optimization altogether, even when it stops being Premature (when it matures?). And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
aranchelk 4y ago
I use a 7 year old low-power laptop. Cooling, electricity usage, and performance of Electron apps are never an issue. Crashes, bugs, lost data, and bad usability still are. I’d rather have devs spend time on that stuff. If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.
- harshreality 4y ago
  Not an issue for you, that you know of, because you have no equivalent software that's written in a more performant language (or at least critical portions of the codebase written in a more performant language). That's part of the problem; in most cases, software users don't know what life would be like with better software. They assume the performance they see is close to optimal, or at least that the devs made an effort to optimize. Users are willing to get used to whatever the software's performance is, in order to have access to the software's features. You can get used to almost anything, as suboptimal performance turns into background noise, but that doesn't mean you should. You get used to waiting 5 seconds for a piece of software to do something that you do on average once every hour or two, not realizing that those 5 seconds, 10 times a day, 365 days a year, cost you 5 hours every year. Optimizing performance and fixing crashes/bugs/dataloss aren't mutually exclusive, either. Developers who care less about code quality than checking boxes for features requested by management or customers, will write code that's both suboptimal and buggy.
  - aranchelk 4y ago
    > Not an issue for you, that you know of, because you have no equivalent software that's written in a more performant language How on earth would you know that? No, incorrect.
zerkten 4y ago
>> When did a lot of software devs stop caring? I'm not sure the devs stopped caring as much as the powers at be. Software development has become more commoditized than we want to believe. Devs following an agile workflow with every intent of performing multiple rounds of optimization find that the product gets shipped as soon as it approximates the thing that had been conceived originally. It doesn't look like an immediate failure, so the less that leadership takes from it is frequently that the level of maturity they shipped is safe. The cycle continues and eventually folks lower down succumb to this shipping pattern. The only things that get them to optimize is competition that successfully drive home their win was due to performance. This doesn't always lead to optimizations when you are an incumbent who can still close more feature gaps because those often result in higher sales and revenue.

RodgerTheGreat 4y ago

It can be a bit dangerous (especially to your employer) to continue that line of thinking, though. How many pieces of software do we collectively work on which would make the world a better place if they didn't exist at all?

asoneth 4y ago
Is that really a downside? In some cases you convince your organization to shift focus onto more useful products, and that can be a really great feeling. In other cases (company is too large, management too committed) it helps you confront exactly who you're working for. Because if you're going to sell your soul, you should at least make sure you're getting a good price.
i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
Meh. I feel like there needs to be an active movement to assess programs that have huge scale (>10m users) to identify unnecessary power usage - whether it be because of a bug, because of unused functionality that nonetheless takes resources, or intermediate steps that take unnecessary power. Perhaps I’m getting into a bit of a niche here, but the rise of stringy formats for data transfer concerns me. There are many-stage pipelines on machines that agree on what a 64 bit integer is, yet each stage performs encoding and decoding of JSON twice (decoding upon receipt, encoding to pass it on to the right place, decoding the response, encoding it in another manner to reply to the original sender). Sounds like a minor concern, but the scale of this instinctively feels like it’d dwarf 250MW globally.
hinkley 4y ago
Oh no! … anyway…
josephg 4y ago
If your job and your conscience disagree, quit your job. You only get one life and we have so many options as engineers. Why make the world worse for ourselves and our children when you have other options?

sseagull 4y ago

Don't forget the waste caused by people throwing away devices that are "too slow", and the resources required to build new computers/phones. Somewhere I saw a rough figure about phones. Something like: if everyone was able to keep their phone one year longer, it would be the equivalent of 600,000 cars off the road or something. (Just looked it up - source is possibly the founder of iFixit). But you know, development velocity or whatever.

einpoklum 4y ago
Actually, in the PC/laptop space, I believe this phenomenon has been waning somewhat over the past... oh, the better part of a decade. This is a result of: * Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing * The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing. * Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and and an SSD) already, even with multiple applications open. .. and all of these had not been the case during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Now, if your machine's hardware doesn't brake down - and you're just a plain desktop user - your motivation for throwing away your machine is quite limited. --- Of course, this is not the case for smartphones, we're still on the roller-coaster there.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  I would say we're coming to that point with phones too. Phones have also largely reached the end of their breakneck big-annual-improvement phase; There's little annual improvement in performance, power consumption, form factor or feature set. Screen resolutions are plenty high for most users, similar for the cameras. Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates.
  - rurp 4y ago
    > Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates. Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.

zerocrates 4y ago

There's a similar calculation (in a slightly different context) in a good scene in the movie Margin Call, about all the miles and hours saved by one bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g