3 ms·

>This is true if your end goal is to have a super fast program but that is very rarely the case. This is true in some banal sense, but kind of misses the point

>This is true if your end goal is to have a super fast program but that is very rarely the case. This is true in some banal sense, but kind of misses the point that there are certain domains where high performance software is a given, and in other domains it may rarely be important. If you're working on games, certain types of financial systems, autonomous vehicles, operating systems, etc. then high performance is critical and something you need to think about quite literally from day one.

tonyarkles 3y ago
> This is true in some banal sense, but kind of misses the point that there are certain domains where high performance software is a given I work in a field where we're trying to squeeze the maximum amount of juice out of a fixed amount of compute (the hardware we're using only gets a rev every couple of years). My background (MSc + past work) was in primarily distributed systems performance analysis, and we definitely designed our system from day one to have an architecture that could support high performance. The GP's comment irks me. There are so many tools I use day-to-day that are ancillary to the work I do where the performance is absolutely miserable. I stare at them in disbelief. I'm processing 500MB/s of high resolution image data on about 30W in my primary system. How the hell does it take 5 seconds for a friggin' email to load in a local application? How does it take 3 seconds for a password search dialog to open when I click on it? How does WhatsApp consume the same amount of memory as QGIS loaded up with hundreds of geoprojected high-resolution images? I agree that many systems don't require maximum-throughput heavy optimization, but there's a spectrum here and it's infuriating to me how far left on that spectrum a lot of applications are.
- vgatherps 3y ago
  I feel the same frustration. I work in a field with stupendously tight latency constraints and am shocked by the disparity vs how much work we fit into tiny deadlines, vs how horrifyingly slow gui software written by well resourced mega corporations is. It feels to me like user interfaces are somehow not considered high-performance applications because they aren't doing super-high-throughput stuff, they're "just a gui", they're running on a phone, etc. All of that is true but it misses that guis are latency/determinism sensitive applications. I remember hearing some quote about how Apple was the only software company that systematically measured response time on their GUIs, and I'd believe it because my apple products are by far the snappiest and most responsive computing devices I have (the only thing that even competes is a very beefy desktop).
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    Yeah, exactly, like... we're doing microsecond-precise high-bandwidth imaging and processing it real-time (not in the Hard Real-Time sense, but in the "we don't have enough RAM to buffer more than a couple of seconds worth of frames and we don't post-process it after the fact" real-time sense) with a team of... 3-5 or so dedicated to the end-to-end flow from photons to ML engine to disk. The ML models themselves are a different team that we just have to bonk once in a while if they do something that hurts throughput too badly. I'm sure we'd be bored as hell working on UI performance optimization, but if we could gamify it somehow... :D
- xarope 3y ago
  I'm now in a new position which requires me to interface with Microsoft products regularly; outlook, teams, etc, are exactly what you say; why does it takes 5 seconds to search for a locally cached email, meanwhile ripgrep has parsed my entire drive in about the same order of magnitude.

tonyarkles 3y ago

> This is true in some banal sense, but kind of misses the point that there are certain domains where high performance software is a given I work in a field where we're trying to squeeze the maximum amount of juice out of a fixed amount of compute (the hardware we're using only gets a rev every couple of years). My background (MSc + past work) was in primarily distributed systems performance analysis, and we definitely designed our system from day one to have an architecture that could support high performance. The GP's comment irks me. There are so many tools I use day-to-day that are ancillary to the work I do where the performance is absolutely miserable. I stare at them in disbelief. I'm processing 500MB/s of high resolution image data on about 30W in my primary system. How the hell does it take 5 seconds for a friggin' email to load in a local application? How does it take 3 seconds for a password search dialog to open when I click on it? How does WhatsApp consume the same amount of memory as QGIS loaded up with hundreds of geoprojected high-resolution images? I agree that many systems don't require maximum-throughput heavy optimization, but there's a spectrum here and it's infuriating to me how far left on that spectrum a lot of applications are.

vgatherps 3y ago
I feel the same frustration. I work in a field with stupendously tight latency constraints and am shocked by the disparity vs how much work we fit into tiny deadlines, vs how horrifyingly slow gui software written by well resourced mega corporations is. It feels to me like user interfaces are somehow not considered high-performance applications because they aren't doing super-high-throughput stuff, they're "just a gui", they're running on a phone, etc. All of that is true but it misses that guis are latency/determinism sensitive applications. I remember hearing some quote about how Apple was the only software company that systematically measured response time on their GUIs, and I'd believe it because my apple products are by far the snappiest and most responsive computing devices I have (the only thing that even competes is a very beefy desktop).
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  Yeah, exactly, like... we're doing microsecond-precise high-bandwidth imaging and processing it real-time (not in the Hard Real-Time sense, but in the "we don't have enough RAM to buffer more than a couple of seconds worth of frames and we don't post-process it after the fact" real-time sense) with a team of... 3-5 or so dedicated to the end-to-end flow from photons to ML engine to disk. The ML models themselves are a different team that we just have to bonk once in a while if they do something that hurts throughput too badly. I'm sure we'd be bored as hell working on UI performance optimization, but if we could gamify it somehow... :D
xarope 3y ago
I'm now in a new position which requires me to interface with Microsoft products regularly; outlook, teams, etc, are exactly what you say; why does it takes 5 seconds to search for a locally cached email, meanwhile ripgrep has parsed my entire drive in about the same order of magnitude.