6 ms·
Modern app bloat in one analogy: Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000 Let’s s
by aeonik 1y ago
Modern app bloat in one analogy:
Business logic size: ~20 bytes
Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes
Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000
Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound.
Then the whole app would weigh:
1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds
What weighs ~2.35 million pounds?
- A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs
- Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs
- A blue whale: ~330,000 lbs
TOTAL: ~2,304,000 lbs
The business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top.
Just to run 20 bytes of logic.
- WD-42 1y agoThis is a cool visualization, thanks.
- aquafox 1y agoOn a related note: Transporting a human in a car is (in relation to weight and size) like using a standard shopping cart to transport two 1L bottles of water. So the next time you walk through a pedestrian area, imagine everyone carrying a bag would use a shopping cart instead. That would be a huge traffic jam -- exactly like what you see on the road!
- WD-42 1y agoI've been pretty aware of this ever since I became a cyclist. I will ride down to the corner store to pick up a six pack and some chips, throw them in a backpack and ride back. It's easy. I see people driving their cars to do the same thing. All that weight and space for a 6 bottles of beer. There is massive waste all around us.
- lostlogin 1y agoThere is also the time component. Off peak and with a decent sized backpack (change of clothes, laptop, food etc) it takes me the same time to go 6km as it does to drive it. At peak it’s 1/4 to 1/3rd the time. Cars are slow around town.
- Zambyte 1y agoThe time component has to factor in both the traffic while driving, and the extra time required to find available parking. I bought an electric scooter a few weeks ago, and I have come to realize that my travel time is pretty much purely a function of distance. I just roll up past traffic if there is any, lock up on any bolted down object, do my business, unlock, and roll out. If anything, I feel like traveling at rush hour is actually strictly better for me. Cars being slow doesn't slow me down, but with the average speed being so much lower during rush hour, it seems like it makes it so if a driver hits me, it would be at a lower speed.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThose people could be driving from 20 minutes away or on their way home from work, or running other errands or picking kids up from school or any number of things. Good for you though.
- Zambyte 1y agoFortunately trains and buses exist.
- bongodongobob 1y agoNot where I live. Not where a lot of people live.
- Zambyte 1y agoOkay, but for the 80+% of people living in cities[1] in one of the countries not particularly known for it's density nor public transportation, buses and trains exist. [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
- eskibars 1y agoThis is so absurd. 1 year ago, I lived in San Rafael (Marin county, Bay Area). I occasionally needed to go to Palo Alto for work meetings. The fastest public transit option was to take a 40 minute bus to Larkspur Landing, then a 30 minute ferry to the SF Ferry building, walk for 20 minutes, and then take Caltrain for 45 minutes or more and then walk from there. With transfers, at minimum it was a 2.5h journey, but typically 3+h All to cover a 60 mile / 100 km distance
- Zambyte 1y agoFortunately bikes (and even e-bikes!) exist. Edit: Also Google Maps says San Rafael to Palo Alto will take 2 hours give or take a few minutes on public transit, with 3 buses, but the middle one you could easily cut out with a bike or a 4 block walk. That doesn't really seem absurd at all for an occasional trip. People do 2 hour drives for an occasional trip and no one bats an eye.
- tengwar2 1y agoIt's a reasonable solution, but let's not forget that simply walking is often at least as good a solution in many countries.
- ornornor 1y agoGetting a trailer (burley cargo in this case, but applies more generally) has been a game changer. I can even bike to ikea and bring back flat packed furniture with it. Or do the weekly groceries. The trailer can carry up to 100lbs iirc (I have an e-bike) Short errands are much nicer with a bike: less effort than walking, much faster than walking, no parking headache at destination, cool breeze in your hair, and free (no gas, insurance, parking, tickets…)
- spiritplumber 1y agoA long time ago in San Antonio TX I was pulled over by the cops while biking back to my little apartment with a bunch of groceries. They were unwilling to believe that an adult would leave the car home to get groceries by bicycle. (I'm from Italy originally).
- bjelkeman-again 1y agoWe experienced the same when we walked down the hill to go shopping in Laguna Niguel, CA. Stopped by cops for walking to the store. Nothing more happened.
- linker3000 1y agoContext: We're from the UK. My wife and I left a meeting in a business park in Phoenix and decided to walk the 5 mins to the local shopping mall, have a look around and then get a taxi back to the apartment in which we were staying (We'd taken a taxi to the meeting). We were about 2 minutes into our walk when a car pulled up and it was one of the people from the meeting. People in the office had spotted us walking and assumed there was some kind of emergency or our car had broken down. We had to be very politely insistent that we didn't need a lift to the mall and were perfectly fine.
- sheepscreek 1y agoI like your username, and what happened to WD-41?
- d-lisp 1y agoIncrementation ?
- WD-42 1y agoIt wasn't the correct answer.
- sheepscreek 1y agoWhat was the question?
- redundantly 1y agoThey're still working on that.
- latexr 1y agohttps://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(answer) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(answer)
- sheepscreek 1y agoHaha - but of course!
- paxcoder 1y agoWhile I appreciate criticizing bloat (why are we packing Chromium in every app again?), I would like to warn against watching every "pound". Images, for example, "weigh" a lot more than code but that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose and add value. That being said, the fact that quick maths can give you a 6 orders of magnitude difference between functional code and the package is probably reason for concern.
- anon7000 1y agoWell, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo, and it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside vs a smaller airplane… you’d probably do it! There’s no incentive in software to get a smaller, more efficient plane, and plenty of incentive to use the big thing for free that has all the extra features
- dented42 1y agoThat analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space… When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.
- dtech 1y agoThat is more a tragedy of the commons thing. For each individual app the comparison holds true
- kulahan 1y agoTragedy of the commons or just a really bad industry?
- IgorPartola 1y agoAnd since we do have app stores as gate keepers, this could easily be remedied by the app stores. They wouldn’t even have to penalize you. Just put a score on there for app size (and app responsiveness) compared to the median in that category. Put this near the star rating from the reviews. Executives don’t generally care that you as an engineer want to reduce an app size by 10% but they really really care about how the app looks on the app stores because that’s what they show to people and what they are judged on.
- leptons 1y agoIt doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory".
- jofla_net 1y agosays more about sociology, really.
- shepherdjerred 1y agoHow many 747's can the average person fit on the 128GB+ smartphone in their pocket?
- rajnathani 1y agoThe commenter messed up on mentioning that a flash drive can be 1 pound, this would be more so the weight of a hard drive.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoExcellent point! And to top it off, the dual flights and whale would need complex orchestration too! We just call it Kubernetes…
- foxglacier 1y agoHuman time is money in software, more analogous to mass in physical goods. So you should calculate the time savings for all the people using the app vs entering the code themselves. Mass is a nonsense analogy that doesn't reveal anything useful.
- tucnak 1y agoThe proposition that Electron apps are somehow "saving time" is preposterous! Of course, the real cost-saving is in labour—web development presents a radically lower barrier to entry compared to even non-native, cross-platform UI/UX platforms such as Qt, or Flutter, or what-have-you, let alone simply managing multiple native applications. So this is not a bill-of-materials kind of analogy, it's a statement about talent. Web leaders have grown complacent; at times, it seems they don't take things seriously. I mean, just take a look at something like SvelteKit. I'm not a web developer, however I happen to like Svelte a lot, but also despise SvelteKit equally as much. Every major release is like "fuck you."
- fwip 1y agoYes, the savings in labour translates to savings in time. This should be obvious. Using Electron to package your application often saves time over writing a native app. Giving a regular user a ready-to-use app saves them time, because they aren't googling "how to use terminal" for five minutes or trying to copy-paste the magic command out of their notepad app.
- tucnak 1y ago> Yes, the savings in labour translates to savings in time. This should be obvious. Under some circumstances; arguably, in only a handful of circumstances. The colloquial 10xer may as well as get the job done at a fraction of the labour cost associated with a 10-man senior (but really, comparatively junior) team, whereas the latter would spend months rewriting, refactoring, troubleshooting, triaging, bug-hunting, what-have-you... Much can be said about inefficiencies of engineering teams.
- 1y ago
- bognition 1y agoThis is an absurd way to think of this. Following this same train of thoughts for humans: The business logic for humans is a single reproductive cell. A single sperm weighs 2.3 x 10^-11 grams. If the average male weighs 75kg the. The bloat ratio for a human male is 3.2x10^15 Getting back to the app there is huge value in not needing to run the command yourself. Sure it’s wrapped in a UI that comes with “bloat” but honestly who cares. When was the last time someone needed to worry about hard drive space, when it comes to a 40mb file.
- m11a 1y agoWell, the apps often come bundled with a bunch of other stuff. Automatic updates, background workers, telemetry … All of which sucks up your compute resources and battery. Repeat for every such little utility app you have on your Mac. Some may implement that random stuff inefficiently (eg very frequent telemetry), which sucks even more. Some of it may even be wrong, vibe coded, or copy pasted. Personally, puts me off installing random utility apps, even if the single utility would be useful.
- Dylan16807 1y agoIn the human analogy, the human has to be the entire computer too. It's all functional, not much bloat. For the app, the computer is external. It really is bloat.
- BestHackerOnHN 1y agoOMG you win HackerNews today with this comment! Super HackerNews!!!
- m3047 1y agoVery nice. Maybe that should be submitted to The Register for their units of measurement menagerie.
- Eric_WVGG 1y agobravo, Douglas Adams would have been proud