4 ms·

Of course every delay is a potential interruption to focus which costs way, way more than the delay itself, so much so it's not worth calculating the actual del

Of course every delay is a potential interruption to focus which costs way, way more than the delay itself, so much so it's not worth calculating the actual delay's 'lost time'. In fact even a momentary delay (my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces) is an opportunity for your focus to drift (why is this damn thing so slow, I should get a new machine, actually, I should lookup the latest thinkpad, maybe I can tune memory use in the meantime, how do you tune macos memory, can you even?, etc ...).

nine_k 3y ago
1000 times this. Also, the time of focus loss grows highly super-linearly with the distracting delay time. One second could be imperceptible, once you get used to it, 15 seconds is enough to get distracted by looking at something else, like checking IM / email and spending 2-3 minutes on returning to the full focus, and 2 minutes is enough to go for a coffee / reddit / YouTube, and a potential loss of an hour of focus time.
josephg 3y ago
> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces I get so angry at this sort of thing. The M1 chips are so fast! When they came out they could open basically any program instantly. But now that they’ve been out for awhile, developers everywhere are (of course) just assuming everyone has an M1 or faster and doing even less optimization on their code. So the net effect is that software doesn’t get any faster. We just collectively spent billions of dollars on new hardware with almost no tangible benefit. (The exceptions being high performance computing - like AI or AAA video games where optimizations still matter). Computers are fast. Slow software comes from lazy developers who steal your cpu cycles instead of doing their jobs properly. It’s inexcusable.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  Cue the usual arguments against performance tuning: "That's premature optimization", "It only has to be fast enough", etc. It bothers me too. We have astonishing computing power, but outside certain applications we mostly just fritter it away. I would love to use a computer which does everything almost instantly, but instead I have to deal with counting to 2 in my head after pressing WinKey before typing my search term and go-and-make-a-cup-of-tea Gradle build times for pretty trivial projects. When it comes to Apple though, I think it's somewhat intentional. "Why don't you have an M1/2 yet? Go buy one!"
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  All right, we've been complaining about this forever. How do we fix it? The best thing I can think of, as a developer, is to deliberately use slower computers to test my software. My daily-driver Windows PC is still a quad-core Skylake from 2016, with 16 GB of RAM and a ~500 GB SSD, and I wonder if even that's too much.
  - sanitycheck 3y ago
    As a developer you can't fix it unless you own the product. Spending time improving performance when you "should" be working on "features" is not looked upon fondly by employers. Companies need to be defining acceptable performance (with metrics) on devices meeting certain specifications at the outset of projects, and failures on those tests need to be treated seriously. Can it really be achieved? Maybe not.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
anonzzzies 3y ago
My 2011 thinkpad is easily many times slower than the m1/m2, yet, when running i3 on my thinkpad, the feel of responsiveness is a lot more snappy as in instance. So in reality, I have a lot less of what you mention on my ancient thinkpad than the m1 for most of what I do daily.
skydhash 3y ago
> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces Wow, mine (M1 MBA) is less than one second. I either use command+tab or the trackpad. I’d be crossed too if it took that long for me.

nine_k 3y ago

1000 times this. Also, the time of focus loss grows highly super-linearly with the distracting delay time. One second could be imperceptible, once you get used to it, 15 seconds is enough to get distracted by looking at something else, like checking IM / email and spending 2-3 minutes on returning to the full focus, and 2 minutes is enough to go for a coffee / reddit / YouTube, and a potential loss of an hour of focus time.

josephg 3y ago

> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces I get so angry at this sort of thing. The M1 chips are so fast! When they came out they could open basically any program instantly. But now that they’ve been out for awhile, developers everywhere are (of course) just assuming everyone has an M1 or faster and doing even less optimization on their code. So the net effect is that software doesn’t get any faster. We just collectively spent billions of dollars on new hardware with almost no tangible benefit. (The exceptions being high performance computing - like AI or AAA video games where optimizations still matter). Computers are fast. Slow software comes from lazy developers who steal your cpu cycles instead of doing their jobs properly. It’s inexcusable.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Cue the usual arguments against performance tuning: "That's premature optimization", "It only has to be fast enough", etc. It bothers me too. We have astonishing computing power, but outside certain applications we mostly just fritter it away. I would love to use a computer which does everything almost instantly, but instead I have to deal with counting to 2 in my head after pressing WinKey before typing my search term and go-and-make-a-cup-of-tea Gradle build times for pretty trivial projects. When it comes to Apple though, I think it's somewhat intentional. "Why don't you have an M1/2 yet? Go buy one!"
mwcampbell 3y ago
All right, we've been complaining about this forever. How do we fix it? The best thing I can think of, as a developer, is to deliberately use slower computers to test my software. My daily-driver Windows PC is still a quad-core Skylake from 2016, with 16 GB of RAM and a ~500 GB SSD, and I wonder if even that's too much.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  As a developer you can't fix it unless you own the product. Spending time improving performance when you "should" be working on "features" is not looked upon fondly by employers. Companies need to be defining acceptable performance (with metrics) on devices meeting certain specifications at the outset of projects, and failures on those tests need to be treated seriously. Can it really be achieved? Maybe not.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

anonzzzies 3y ago

My 2011 thinkpad is easily many times slower than the m1/m2, yet, when running i3 on my thinkpad, the feel of responsiveness is a lot more snappy as in instance. So in reality, I have a lot less of what you mention on my ancient thinkpad than the m1 for most of what I do daily.

skydhash 3y ago

> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces Wow, mine (M1 MBA) is less than one second. I either use command+tab or the trackpad. I’d be crossed too if it took that long for me.