5 ms·

I'm an embedded engineer and I'm always surprised at how slow software is. I bought a new laptop that had Windows 11 pre-installed, SSD, all the bells and whis

I'm an embedded engineer and I'm always surprised at how slow software is. I bought a new laptop that had Windows 11 pre-installed, SSD, all the bells and whistles. Just loading up it takes 5GB of RAM, eats my CPU trying to index files and still can't find the files I want faster than a brute force search. What does Windows really do now more than my Windows 95 PC? It connects to the network, browses files and can load a web browser. Why does it need to be so bloated just to sit there ready to load a web browser

kaba0 3y ago
> Just loading up it takes 5GB of RAM Not taking it up is not utilizing the hardware properly.
- pkolaczk 3y ago
  Taking it up for no visible performance gain is wasting, not utilizing.
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    Oh, believe me, it is very visible. You can test this easily on a desktop PC. Start it & browse websites when 10+ GB of RAM are inserted and when 2 or 4 are intserted.
- envsubst 3y ago
  This is only true if: 1. There aren't other processes that need to share the system. 2. There are no spikes in memory usage. Neither are true. The less memory each component uses the more you can run at once and it will likely be faster too.
sznio 3y ago
* A developer who produces faster code is more expensive to hire. * Any developer - good or bad - will deliver the same feature faster if they implement it naively, rather than digging deep and optimizing it. * A slow implementation might cost less to maintain later. * The vendor doesn't pay the cost of their code being slow. It's the customer that has to pay for the hardware upgrade. Each company just edges the line between most profit (by cheaply producing slow software) and complete death (by producing software so slow your customers leave instantly a competitor shows up, e.g. Discord killing Skype) I can't wait for CPUs to stop developing. Companies will have to return to efficiency in order to actually support more features.

kaba0 3y ago

> Just loading up it takes 5GB of RAM Not taking it up is not utilizing the hardware properly.

pkolaczk 3y ago
Taking it up for no visible performance gain is wasting, not utilizing.
- carstenhag 3y ago
  Oh, believe me, it is very visible. You can test this easily on a desktop PC. Start it & browse websites when 10+ GB of RAM are inserted and when 2 or 4 are intserted.
envsubst 3y ago
This is only true if: 1. There aren't other processes that need to share the system. 2. There are no spikes in memory usage. Neither are true. The less memory each component uses the more you can run at once and it will likely be faster too.

sznio 3y ago

* A developer who produces faster code is more expensive to hire. * Any developer - good or bad - will deliver the same feature faster if they implement it naively, rather than digging deep and optimizing it. * A slow implementation might cost less to maintain later. * The vendor doesn't pay the cost of their code being slow. It's the customer that has to pay for the hardware upgrade. Each company just edges the line between most profit (by cheaply producing slow software) and complete death (by producing software so slow your customers leave instantly a competitor shows up, e.g. Discord killing Skype) I can't wait for CPUs to stop developing. Companies will have to return to efficiency in order to actually support more features.