5 ms·

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

by RachelF 10mo ago

alliao 10mo ago
now that's a word i haven't heard in a while...optimising
- cube00 10mo ago
  > optimising Usually followed by "stock holder value"
  - bigiain 10mo ago
    And to the tech staff, some out of context and misunderstood quote from semi technical management which starts with the word "Premature"
- tom_ 10mo ago
  If you used it yourself, even if only to ask out loud whether the performance is acceptable enough not to require the extra work, you'd hear it all the time. Be the change you want to see!
- sahilagarwal 10mo ago
  Yeah. I'm all for sprints to start focusing on optimizations and bug smashing instead of just barreling down the road of profitability while the middle managers hold a gun to your head.
650REDHAIR 10mo ago
I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...
- vanviegen 10mo ago
  That's a very indirect way of enjoying the benefits of Linux.
  - 650REDHAIR 10mo ago
    Unfortunately I have to use Windows for work :( . At home I have Windows, MacOS, Mint, SteamOS, etc.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Can we get web sites to optimize as well? I use a slower laptop and a lot of sites are terrible. My old Sparc station (40mhz) had a better web experience in 1997 because than people cared about this.
  - giantrobot 10mo ago
    Hey XML is ucky, we wouldn't want to just serve it directly and let XSL "hydrate" it in the native browser engine. It's a way better idea to download Doom 2 worth of JavaScript and use a data serialization format without built-in schema validation. Why get all that capability for inside a native browser engine? We should reinvent all of it to run as JavaScript!
- conception 10mo ago
  So you’ve hated Windows for the last 30 years?
irae 10mo ago
RIP electron apps and PWAs. Need to go native, as chromium based stuff is so memory hungry. PWAs on Safari use way less memory, but PWA support in Safari is not great.
- bigiain 10mo ago
  I, for one, would not miss a single one of the electron apps I'm forced to use. Every single one of them makes me feel like the vendor is telling me "we can't be bothered employing half decent developers or giving the developers we have enough time and resources to write decent software, so we're just going to use cheap and inexperience web developers and burn another gigabyte or two of your memory to run what could easily be a sub 100MB native app." At least now I'll have significant numbers to tell my boss: "Sure, we can continue to use Slack/VSCode/Teams/Figma/Postman/ - but each of those is going to require an additional GB or two of memory on every staff member's computer - which at today's pricing is over $500 in ram per laptop which are all on a 18-24 month replacement cycle. So that's maybe a million dollars a year in hardware budget to run those 5 applications across the whole team. We'll need to ensure we have signoff on that expenditure before we renew our subscriptions for those apps."
  - BobaFloutist 10mo ago
    Your laptops have an 18-24 month replacement cycle? What are you guys doing to the poor things?
  - astrange 10mo ago
    Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved. Not that I know what's going on in an Electron app heap (because there's no inspection tools afaik), but I'm guessing much of it is compiled code and the rest is images and text layout related.
    - tavavex 10mo ago
      > Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved. What? Are you talking about assets? You'd need a considerable amount of very high-res, uncompressed or low-compressed assets to use up 100MB. Not to mention all the software that uses vector icons, which take up a near-zero amount of space in comparison to raster images. Electron apps always take up a massive amount of space because every separate install is a fully self-contained version of Chromium. No matter how lightweight your app is, Electron will always force a pretty large space overhead.
jjcm 10mo ago
Likewise, Slack. Currently at 2.3GB. I'm very curious if this AI wave will actually lead to more native apps being made, since the barrier to doing so will be lower.
- CuriousRose 10mo ago
  I can't fathom why this is even possible, let alone acceptable. You could write an equally featured text chat client in a terminal (IRC style) - no video or file sharing of course - but do those things really need to consume the remaining 2.29 GB of RAM? Surely video calls have a native capture method in Windows/macOS now where you can overlay the controls for fairly cheap resources, and file sharing only needs to consume RAM during the upload process. What gives with these apps? Like seriously, is it the fact that they need to load a whole browser environment just to run 100mb of JS? If so, why bother shipping an app at all? Just encourage users to allow notifications in the browser for the site and be done with it. No apps to maintain, instant patching on refresh, where's the obvious downside I'm missing?
UltraSane 10mo ago
PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives used as page cache can help a lot.
boznz 10mo ago
Old codger here, happy to rewrite any of your bloated software to run on a twenty year old PC at reasonable rates..
rldjbpin 10mo ago
this could be the only silver lining, a gulf oil crisis of sorts to (at least temporarily) bring out "innovation" out of necessity. unfortunately for a vast majority of people, memory is not the biggest constraint in pedestrian computing needs.

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

by RachelF 10mo ago

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

alliao 10mo ago

now that's a word i haven't heard in a while...optimising

cube00 10mo ago
> optimising Usually followed by "stock holder value"
- bigiain 10mo ago
  And to the tech staff, some out of context and misunderstood quote from semi technical management which starts with the word "Premature"
tom_ 10mo ago
If you used it yourself, even if only to ask out loud whether the performance is acceptable enough not to require the extra work, you'd hear it all the time. Be the change you want to see!
sahilagarwal 10mo ago
Yeah. I'm all for sprints to start focusing on optimizations and bug smashing instead of just barreling down the road of profitability while the middle managers hold a gun to your head.

650REDHAIR 10mo ago

I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...

vanviegen 10mo ago
That's a very indirect way of enjoying the benefits of Linux.
- 650REDHAIR 10mo ago
  Unfortunately I have to use Windows for work :( . At home I have Windows, MacOS, Mint, SteamOS, etc.
bluGill 10mo ago
Can we get web sites to optimize as well? I use a slower laptop and a lot of sites are terrible. My old Sparc station (40mhz) had a better web experience in 1997 because than people cared about this.
- giantrobot 10mo ago
  Hey XML is ucky, we wouldn't want to just serve it directly and let XSL "hydrate" it in the native browser engine. It's a way better idea to download Doom 2 worth of JavaScript and use a data serialization format without built-in schema validation. Why get all that capability for inside a native browser engine? We should reinvent all of it to run as JavaScript!
conception 10mo ago
So you’ve hated Windows for the last 30 years?

irae 10mo ago

RIP electron apps and PWAs. Need to go native, as chromium based stuff is so memory hungry. PWAs on Safari use way less memory, but PWA support in Safari is not great.

bigiain 10mo ago
I, for one, would not miss a single one of the electron apps I'm forced to use. Every single one of them makes me feel like the vendor is telling me "we can't be bothered employing half decent developers or giving the developers we have enough time and resources to write decent software, so we're just going to use cheap and inexperience web developers and burn another gigabyte or two of your memory to run what could easily be a sub 100MB native app." At least now I'll have significant numbers to tell my boss: "Sure, we can continue to use Slack/VSCode/Teams/Figma/Postman/ - but each of those is going to require an additional GB or two of memory on every staff member's computer - which at today's pricing is over $500 in ram per laptop which are all on a 18-24 month replacement cycle. So that's maybe a million dollars a year in hardware budget to run those 5 applications across the whole team. We'll need to ensure we have signoff on that expenditure before we renew our subscriptions for those apps."
- BobaFloutist 10mo ago
  Your laptops have an 18-24 month replacement cycle? What are you guys doing to the poor things?
- astrange 10mo ago
  Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved. Not that I know what's going on in an Electron app heap (because there's no inspection tools afaik), but I'm guessing much of it is compiled code and the rest is images and text layout related.
  - tavavex 10mo ago
    > Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved. What? Are you talking about assets? You'd need a considerable amount of very high-res, uncompressed or low-compressed assets to use up 100MB. Not to mention all the software that uses vector icons, which take up a near-zero amount of space in comparison to raster images. Electron apps always take up a massive amount of space because every separate install is a fully self-contained version of Chromium. No matter how lightweight your app is, Electron will always force a pretty large space overhead.

jjcm 10mo ago

Likewise, Slack. Currently at 2.3GB. I'm very curious if this AI wave will actually lead to more native apps being made, since the barrier to doing so will be lower.

CuriousRose 10mo ago
I can't fathom why this is even possible, let alone acceptable. You could write an equally featured text chat client in a terminal (IRC style) - no video or file sharing of course - but do those things really need to consume the remaining 2.29 GB of RAM? Surely video calls have a native capture method in Windows/macOS now where you can overlay the controls for fairly cheap resources, and file sharing only needs to consume RAM during the upload process. What gives with these apps? Like seriously, is it the fact that they need to load a whole browser environment just to run 100mb of JS? If so, why bother shipping an app at all? Just encourage users to allow notifications in the browser for the site and be done with it. No apps to maintain, instant patching on refresh, where's the obvious downside I'm missing?

UltraSane 10mo ago

PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives used as page cache can help a lot.

boznz 10mo ago

Old codger here, happy to rewrite any of your bloated software to run on a twenty year old PC at reasonable rates..

rldjbpin 10mo ago

this could be the only silver lining, a gulf oil crisis of sorts to (at least temporarily) bring out "innovation" out of necessity. unfortunately for a vast majority of people, memory is not the biggest constraint in pedestrian computing needs.