[HN Gopher] Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. W...
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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?
Author : dceddia
Score : 490 points
Date : 2023-06-23 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| vasili111 wrote:
| I have never worked on modern Mac. Does they have same UI lag as
| UI in modern Windows or UI on modern Mac reacts instantly?
| pacifika wrote:
| iOS is pretty fast though.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Everything in ios has animations that gives the appearance of
| sluggishness
| dale_glass wrote:
| Eh... a bit inaccurate, I think.
|
| First, he's probably running those OSes on a monster of a
| machine, relatively speaking. Stuff is snappy on my desktop too,
| which has a PCIe4 NVMe drive and 128 GB RAM. Chromium, which is a
| huge and very complex application starts up in maybe a second or
| less.
|
| When you're doing old school computing today it's easy to max out
| the specs to a point that would be unrealistic in that time. You
| can put 128MB RAM into a machine when most people in the day
| might have had 16MB. NT4 is from 1996, and that machine is from
| 2000, so seems likely. I remember computers back in the day.
| Windows 2000 ran slowly on the hardware I had.
|
| Second, modern software does way more in the name of convenience.
| Eg, nobody really uses notepad. We use VS Code for instance,
| which is an enormous application, the sort that would have
| seriously challenged a computer back then.
|
| And really everything grew in the same manner. Discord is big,
| but Discord draws its own widgets and includes a web browser. If
| you did Discord with native widgets, plain text and without all
| the fancy stuff like animated emoji and special effects, it'd be
| much lighter and faster to start too.
| abwizz wrote:
| > very complex application starts up in maybe a second or less
|
| nailed it.
|
| a second is a very long (noticeable) time and as a user i don't
| really care, i want it fast and consistent.
| dale_glass wrote:
| And very short for a big thing you load once.
|
| Back in the day plenty things like Photoshop had splash
| screens, and you got to stare at them for quite a while.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except we're not talking about loading something big like
| Photoshop. We're talking about starting the modern versions
| of system Notepad or Calculator.
|
| The big stuff like Photoshop loads roughly as long as it
| did before. This is a good indicator of how bad most
| software is - if applications like Photoshop followed the
| same performance/feature curve, they'd take hours to start.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I was talking about Chromium starting in a second or
| less. That's the open version of Google Chrome. It's a
| big application by any reasonable standard, and not
| something you start often either.
| bcon wrote:
| There's pretty clearly a law of conserved latency, that users
| will gladly suffer x latency for y capability, with capability
| complexifying until things are too slow, requiring then hw/sw
| stack upgrades to make it all fast again, while overall
| capability utilization decreases
| justinator wrote:
| In 2000, I would turn on my Pentium MMX 233Mhz machine running
| Windows 95, and then go and make popcorn while it started up.
| raldi wrote:
| Wait'll you hear about changing TV channels in 1985.
| rirze wrote:
| It's asinine how slow service provider's boxes work nowadays.
| Our Xfinity cable box has a .5-1.0 input lag, (more like 2secs
| for ff/rw/play) and it's the same even after customer service
| replaced it with another unit. What a waste of resources...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Wait'll you hear about changing TV channels in 1985._
|
| Turning on a TV in 1975: wait 60 seconds for the tube to warm
| up.
|
| Turning on a TV in 1985: wait 10 seconds for the tube to warm
| up.
|
| Turning on a TV in 1995: wait 2 seconds for the tube to warm
| up.
|
| Turning on a TV in 2023: stare at the LG logo for 20 seconds,
| then wait another 30 seconds "for Smart Services to become
| available" in order to change the channel.
| sgt wrote:
| Or for my nearly brand new Samsung smart TV - starts up in
| about 5 seconds, then you can happily watch TV and I did for
| a few months until it forced an update, which slowed things
| down.
|
| Now things still work, but the TV needs a restart about once
| a week if I use the built in apps like YouTube or Netflix.
|
| Finally bought an Apple TV 4K and it "boots" directly into
| it. Such a relief! (Well, except for that bizarre touch
| remote that came with the Apple TV, but that's a small price
| to pay!)
| elbac wrote:
| 'What is a TV channel?' (said by my daughter to me recently)
| stavros wrote:
| That OS is five years old when that computer was made.
|
| Here's a much more apt comparison (still really snappy):
|
| https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065/mediaVie...
| bee_rider wrote:
| My system pops up a terminal pretty much instantaneously, maybe
| he just needs to turn off transparency or something? I mean I'm
| on Linux but I'm sure Windows can be configured somehow...
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Ok, so the NT machine has no opening animations. The W11 machine
| has opening animations. Those things have a fixed running time.
| They're used so that the opening isn't so jarring to the eye, but
| yes, it slows shit waaaay down.
| memalign wrote:
| I suspect that these animations make launch feel faster much of
| the time by hiding the true launch time of the app. And I think
| this is a primary purpose of launch animations.
|
| Compare to iPhone OS 1: apps had static launch images that the
| OS animates to be visible so an app has hundreds of
| milliseconds to load before the user feels a hang.
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| matwood wrote:
| People bring up cruft and lack of optimization, but leave out the
| user demand for features.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Did notepad and command prompt really get that many more
| features?
| vel0city wrote:
| Command prompt (now Terminal)? Yes, tons. A massive amount of
| new features really.
|
| Notepad? Kind of. Newer UI library so it handles display
| scaling a lot better. Handles different line endings and
| encodings much better now. Handles the system UI dark mode.
| The interface supports tabs.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Command prompt (now Terminal)? Yes, tons. A massive amount
| of new features really.
|
| Can you name a few that could explain the 1,000x
| performance cost?
|
| Also, have you heard the story about the guy who told MS
| that their terminal was shit and could be fixed, only to be
| ridiculed by a fleet of "super elite 500k/year engineers"
| that in the end turned out to be ... wrong?
| vel0city wrote:
| Display scaling support
|
| Tabbed interface
|
| Support for command interpreters other than just CMD
|
| Multiple profiles for different interpreters and settings
|
| Support for a much wider range of console control
| characters and terminal emulations (ssh'ing into linux
| boxes works really well)
|
| Way better resizing support
|
| Clickable URL detection
|
| More (and customizable) keyboard shortcuts
|
| Support for background images
|
| Support for transparency
|
| Configurations as easy to transfer JSON files
|
| Copying text is a way better experience
|
| Just a few of the features that I use all the time. I
| can't stand using cmd.exe anymore, its an absolutely
| miserable experience in comparison.
| tom_ wrote:
| I've been using a command interpreter other than cmd for
| over 20 years.
| lhecker wrote:
| Unfortunately, none of these are responsible for the
| startup delay. Since version 1.18 effectively ~90% of the
| startup duration is spent starting up WinUI and having it
| draw the tab bar and window frame. It still needs a
| second to start. If it still used GDI like Windows NT
| did, it would start in well under 100ms even on an
| extremely old CPU.
|
| Fixing this situation is essentially impossible because
| it requires rewriting almost everything that modern
| Windows is built on. Someone else in this thread said you
| couldn't sell 4 quarters worth of work to fix this, but
| the reality is that it requires infinite quarters,
| because it requires throwing away the last 10 years of
| Windows shell and UI work and that will never happen. You
| could paper over it by applying performance spotfixes
| here and there, but it'll never go back to how it could
| be that way. At a minimum, you'd essentially have to
| throw away WinRT which has an almost viral negative
| impact on performance. Never before have high latency,
| but still synchronous cross process RPCs been that
| prevalent and everything's a heap allocated object, even
| if it's within the same binary. It's JuniorFootgunRT.
| vel0city wrote:
| > none of these are responsible for the startup delay
|
| > effectively ~90% of the startup duration is spent
| starting up WinUI and having it draw the tab bar and
| window frame
|
| I listed "Display scaling support", "Tabbed interface",
| and "transparency". Is none of that related to WinUI and
| drawing the _tab bar_?
| lhecker wrote:
| Yeah, you're right, they're related to WinUI. But what I
| meant is that such features aren't inherently expensive,
| they're just made expensive due to the choice of UI
| framework.
|
| Display scaling is very fast in GDI apps and has no
| impact on launch time, a tab bar is essentially just an
| array of buttons (minimal impact on launch time?) and
| transparency is a virtually cost-free feature coming from
| DWM. I wrote a WinUI lookalike using its underlying
| technology (Direct2D and DirectComposition) directly one
| time and that results in an application that starts up
| within ~10ms of CPU time on my laptop, quite unlike the
| 450ms I'm seeing for WinUI. That is including UIA,
| localization and auto-layout support.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Just a few of the features that I use all the time.
|
| O RLY?
|
| Do you have a transparent terminal with a background
| image? (If so, well ... to each its own :^))
|
| Do you transfer your JSON config files "all the time"?
|
| >Copying text is a way better experience
|
| It literally is Ctrl-C and it's been like that for
| _ages_. When did it become a "way better experience"? I
| missed that.
|
| Modern UX is absolute trash performance-wise. And you're
| falling into the same pit as the geniuses of the story I
| mentioned before.
| vel0city wrote:
| I do keep my config backed up and synced between my
| computers. It doesn't change that much but it's nice
| having it easily synced across my many machines when I do
| make a change.
|
| And no, copying text hasn't been Ctrl+c. That sequence
| sends a sigint to the process, not a copy request. To
| copy text by default cmd made you enter a mark mode which
| then had you essentially draw a rectangle and it would
| then copy as newline characters even when it should have
| just continued the line. The old copying process of cmd
| is terrible.
| anthk wrote:
| That could be done under URxvt and a 486 or a Pentium
| with 100x less resources.
| themitigating wrote:
| Windoes NT on a machine from the day was incredibly slow. I
| remember opening Netscape Navigator and took minutes.
| asciimov wrote:
| I remember those days, Win 3 was never that snappy. You had to
| wait and it was really happy to crash if more than a couple of
| programs were running.
|
| Win9x was better, you could run a few more apps without too many
| issues. But blue screens were super common. But it was fairly
| responsive if you didn't have too much running.
|
| Win2000, yeah it could be that responsive.
|
| What stands out to me, is Windows is very responsive the less
| stuff that is running, even today. Once those older machines had
| to do anything else you had to wait.
|
| Those old apps sat much closer to the metal. I can't imagine how
| many layers sit between windows apps today, worse if they off
| Electron.
| sodimel wrote:
| Network call are incredibly slow compared to a processor call to
| L1, L2 (damn even L3 cache, an ssd or ram!), so I assume that
| every telemetry option is putting this computer in a state of "I
| will waste billions of cycles waiting for an answer from a server
| for something I could launch right away if I wanted to".
| sneak wrote:
| Windows has a lot more telemetry and spyware and advertising code
| in it now that is constantly running. There's probably 10x the
| number of running processes on a modern Microsoft OS, most of
| them useless to you.
|
| Also all of the support APIs and libraries for text editing and
| image display are orders of magnitude more complex now: eg
| Notepad supports unicode and emoji.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| For those who were not around, or forgot: A fresh install was
| indeed glorious. Fast, clean, snappy, but everything invariably
| slowed down to a crawl within a few months and you had to
| reinstall and reformat about once a year go get your shit under
| control because it became unbearable.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| TBF I have been using a Windows 10 machine on a 2017 lenovo
| laptop for a couple of years and I like the experience. Once I
| managed to turn off all those widgets Windows 10 brought with it
| the experience improved a lot.
|
| Of course I'm not using any heavy duty applications, and I only
| play classic games for which even a Pentium is a bit of overkill.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Opening Notepad, a DOS prompt, and Paint do not faithfully
| represent the app load speed experience on that hardware. Try
| Microsoft Office, or CorelDraw, etc.
| _dain_ wrote:
| You can open notepad, a terminal prompt, and paint on modern
| Windows and it will be sluggish.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Yup. Meanwhile I can fire up nvim or Gnumeric and they also
| launch basically instantaneously. Selection bias, it's a thing.
| pushedx wrote:
| This wasn't my experience back in ~2002 running my Windows NT
| variant of choice, Windows 2000.
|
| Especially due to the mechanical disk, everything seemed to take
| 2 to 10 times longer than it does today the first time it had to
| be done after a reboot, and if physical memory was exhausted and
| the OS started swapping, forget it, you might be staring at an
| hour glass for multiple minutes to open a web browser or
| something of the sort.
|
| I love SSDs and multicore machines of today.
| chungy wrote:
| There was a marked difference between Windows 2000 and XP.
|
| Windows 2000: Everything opens instantly, no delays. Felt nice.
|
| Windows XP: Noticably more sluggish than Windows 2000.
|
| They've never recovered.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| What disgusts me the most is on the modern system every single
| window either animates in a glitched empty then flickers to
| redraw properly or animates in an interface but then flashes as
| it redraws to show what it's supposed to be.
|
| Resizing makes the windows flicker disgustingly. Even the mouse
| cursor changing to the resize widget often draws a large glitched
| cursor for a single frame on every windows machine I've used
| sometimes.
|
| If someone ever fixed this trash and made the OS feel solid and
| not a flickering glitchy mess I'd be in their debt.
| qsantos wrote:
| I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of
| demonstrations: "Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more.
| Also, security."
|
| Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at
| least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute
| power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage.
|
| Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most
| cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human
| mind.
|
| It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software
| nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work
| at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire
| people who can churn new features.
|
| And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user
| time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a
| native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push
| Web apps everywhere.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Except, that they are not
|
| My experiences with NixOS show me that they are. What do I mean
| by that? I am forced (MSFT Intune) to use Ubuntu for work, and
| was using MacOS prior to that. Both took a good heft of time to
| boot up, especially compared to the WinNT example. They are
| general purpose and come with everything under the sun
| installed _in-case_ the user needs it. In the latter case
| (MacOS) your hands are also pretty tied when it comes to
| slimming it down (to be clear, apps are easy to remove, but not
| system cruft).
|
| The slowest parts of bootup on my personal PC (NixOS) are POST
| and the GRUB timeout. NixOS takes less time than either (< 2
| seconds). I chalk that up to NixOS installing very little more
| than I tell it to.
|
| I agree that WebApps make situation significantly worse, but
| the OS itself is full of garbage that does eat CPU cycles and
| IOPs.
| tracker1 wrote:
| And when computers will be 30% faster in a couple years, vs.
| multiplying the developer time/cost it's a trade off.
| rahen wrote:
| What the hardware gives, the developer takes away. Developers
| will get computers 30% faster, then release 30% slower
| software, in a never ending cycle.
|
| Right now, an M1 is pretty fast, but wait until all
| developers use it and it starts to become barely adequate.
|
| Rephrasing Wirth's law: It takes slow hardware to develop
| fast software.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| > And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of
| user time
|
| That's exactly it, and there's no shame in that. I can, as a
| solo developer, build a fully featured app with a responsive UI
| and produce artifacts that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I
| can do that in a weekend, because of the technologies we have
| at our disposal. Something that would have taken a team of
| developers several months to do.
|
| On the other hand, the fact that we're abstracting everything
| except the business logic away is a big advantage. As soon as
| Chrome pushes a performance update we can see apps across the
| board performing 10% faster.
| malexw wrote:
| I'll share a memory circa 2010 from my time at BlackBerry that
| comes to mind when people point out performance problems like
| this.
|
| Around that time, whenever a new BlackBerry device was rebooted,
| it would take about 45 seconds for the OS to fully boot and
| become usable. I'm making up the actual times in this story
| because I can't remember the exact details now. Like in this
| video, the oldest devices would start up nearly instantly, but
| the boot sequence for modern devices was agonizing. Especially
| when you were an engineer trying to run a test that required
| rebooting the device!
|
| One day, a pair of engineers finally became annoyed and curious
| enough to look into it and profile the problem. They found that a
| substantial portion of the boot time was spent parsing XML files
| that contained descriptions for device themes - that is,
| information about colors, icons, and text styles that users could
| choose from to customize their device. Something like a full 15
| seconds was spent just on this one feature as part of the boot
| sequence!
|
| So what happened? I suppose that no other engineers felt they had
| the responsibility or the time available to look into the long
| boot times until that point. But imagine being an engineer at a
| company like Microsoft, and one day saying to your manager or
| product manager: "Hey, can I spend a week on understanding why it
| takes a full second for Terminal to boot on Windows and see if we
| can speed that up?" How many managers are going to be
| enthusiastic about that when they're staring down a kanban board
| with enough tasks to fill 4 quarters?
|
| The only reason these engineers at BlackBerry were able to look
| into the bootup times was because they didn't have to answer to
| anyone responsible for product. The team lead for this team at
| the time was "Engineer #2" at BlackBerry who had written all the
| apps for the first devices. His team was given permission to
| pursue whatever ideas or prototypes interested them, so they had
| the breathing room to chase leads like this that wouldn't
| necessarily pay off.
|
| So part of the answer is that I don't think we as an industry are
| prioritizing performance. Once the performance is good enough,
| it's time to ship and move on to the next feature. But the other
| side is that we're building in more dynamic behaviour to our
| software. More customization, more flexibility, more behaviour
| that's defined at run-time. And this all probably makes software
| more useful and makes it easier for engineers to build more
| complex software. I think it's a similar kind of trade-off to
| choosing between python or Rust for a tool you're working on.
| What kind of performance do you need, and what kind of developer
| experience do you want?
| ynniv wrote:
| Software is slow because being slow isn't fatal.
| kobalsky wrote:
| I'd love to see it booting and then cold starting the apps, for
| comparison.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think a lot of that could be brought back to something closer
| to resembling immediacy if you go and take the time to remove all
| the stuff they introduced along with vista (The fadein/fadeout
| animations especially)
| toyg wrote:
| I think you mean "with XP". So bloated, with all that bevelling
| and shadows and DRM...
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| Windows 2000 was peak Windows, minus security. Security is
| miles and miles better today.
|
| Nothing will change my mind about this, ever. It's been
| downhill since then.
| vel0city wrote:
| Does Windows 2000 handle native Bluetooth better? What
| about WiFi SSID management? Does it ship with good IPv6
| support?
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| no, no, and no. Lets see if we can petition Microsoft to
| add them, and then we'll see if Win2000 still runs
| decently fast on a P4 with 4gb of ram.
|
| My guess is: yes, it will.
|
| Somehow, in the past 15 years, "progress" seems to
| include "software keeps getting noticeably worse, but
| anyone pointing this out has to be shot down because
| progress."
| vel0city wrote:
| Ah, there's another question, I'm running 32GB of RAM
| currently on this machine and 64GB at home. How well does
| Windows 2000 support >4GB RAM or SMP? Does it come with a
| good hypervisor? I do like running a lot of VMs in
| Hyper-V as well.
|
| Sure sounds like there's a ton of gaps in things I really
| want out of my operating system on Windows 2000...
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| so, I can't reply to your latest message because it's too
| far down but...
|
| Let me just hop on my wifi and browse the web. Lets do it
| on a computer from 1999. 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. 2004.
| 2005. 2006. 2007. 2008... etc, etc.
|
| Why is it that every couple years from 2012 onwards,
| doing the same thing keeps taking longer, even with new
| hardware, without the same revolutions in quality and
| experience that came with that new software previously?
| vel0city wrote:
| Your 1999 computer supports WPA-2 out of the box? TLS
| 1.3?
|
| > doing the same thing keeps taking longer
|
| But I'm not doing the same things anymore. I'm doing a
| lot more. Things that aren't supported in that 1999 OS at
| all.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| ... you completely missed the relevant part with the
| "1999" part. The relevant part is the "2012" part. Things
| used to get better, do more, and faster. The last 15
| years, the "do more" part has been less and less useful,
| and the "faster" part has turned into "slower" in a
| number of ways. Software engineers are relying on an
| increase in hardware performance to pick up their slack,
| and that line is running out quickly, and there will be
| many years ahead where we're cleaning up over a decade of
| laziness.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Things used to get better, do more, and faster.
|
| I bought a newer PC because my older one from 2012 legit
| wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do. It couldn't
| handle the VR applications I wanted to run, as its PCIe
| and RAM performance just wouldn't be up to the task to
| run the resolutions, texture qualities, and latencies I
| wanted. The newer one is miles ahead of the older
| hardware, and the applications I use are significantly
| better because of it.
|
| But even then, from the other perspective of continuing
| to run similar-ish workloads using newer software, a lot
| of the other things continue to run the same experience-
| wise with slightly better features than when the software
| was new. When I first built that 2012 machine I installed
| the then brand-new Windows 8 on it. These days its
| running Windows 10. From a UX perspective it definitely
| feels faster than the OS it shipped with. Things like the
| new Terminal app are way better functionally than the old
| cmd.exe that used to be on it. I do demand more still
| from using VSCode with more plugins and what not than
| before while previously I used things like PyCharm more.
| I videochat, watch more streaming content on it than when
| I first had it, and it consumes far more animated GIFs
| and what not than it used to.
|
| But in the end even with software supposedly getting more
| bloated and what not, its _at least_ as snappy if not
| more than it was when it was brand new in 2012, other
| than the fact there 's a whole new class of application I
| demand from my hardware.
|
| So yeah, even today things are still getting better,
| doing more, and getting faster. Its not the extreme
| doubling or quadrupling of stuff like the 80s and 90s
| where things literally went from only text interfaces to
| GUIs to 3D apps, but there's still bleeding edge stuff
| that legit just takes more oomph than a box from 2012.
| electroly wrote:
| I think you're right in general but I'll note that
| Windows 2000 does support PAE (very limited >4GB support
| on 32-bit) and SMP.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| Sure does.
|
| Does the switch to 64 bit slow things down enough to
| explain what happened between Windows 2000 and XP?
|
| Does the operating system have to support virtual
| machines? Seems easy enough to install vmware then run
| operating systems inside it for most use cases.
|
| I mean, you can keep 'what if'ing me here, but, is it
| really worth having all the features that you, clearly as
| a power user or professional, use installed on every
| computer everywhere? No. No it really doesn't. It's
| bloat.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Seems easy enough to install vmware then run operating
| systems inside it for most use cases.
|
| That's a way different experience than running Hyper-V.
|
| > is it really worth having all the features that you,
| clearly as a power user or professional, use installed on
| every computer everywhere? No. No it really doesn't. It's
| bloat.
|
| I also didn't realize that managing WiFi networks or
| using display scaling are things only power users and
| professionals would want on their machines. I guess
| supporting Bluetooth natively in the OS and a modern
| sound stack is just bloat for most people.
| Tanoc wrote:
| There's been a problem of lateral rather than forward
| progress in nearly all industries since the early 2000s.
| Lateral progress being a different way to do the same
| exact thing (a doorknob versus a lever latch for
| example), and forward progress being a new way to do a
| similar thing but in a much more efficient and modular
| way.
|
| It's been bothering me for some time ever since I noticed
| it with the advent of IoT "smart" devices that have the
| same features as traditional appliances for twice the
| cost and technical debt. My washing machine still washes
| clothes and turns itself off, but now I need to set the
| wash type using my phone because lateral progress
| dictates a physical interface on the device itself is
| obsolete.
| Tostino wrote:
| I used windows 2000 for many, many years. Pretty sure until 7
| came out.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it
| frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how
| unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself
| around it.
|
| I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the
| engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called
| the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine
| so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess
| that is lost to time!
| lenkite wrote:
| People got too used to the Web - slowly loading stuff - and so
| began to tolerate native apps also loading slow.
| palata wrote:
| And they got too used to receiving updates over the internet
| (as opposed to buying a CD-ROM), and so began to tolerate
| software full of bugs.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| About 20 years ago I was evaluating solutions for reporting to
| see if we could save money switching from Crystal Reports. One
| reason we stayed with Crystal was they did something they other
| report engines did not; they made available for display every
| page as it was rendered. So for a 400 page report, you could
| start working with it immediately. It took each engine (with a
| couple exceptions) about the same time to generate the entire
| report, but for the other engines, you had to wait until they
| were done.
|
| There is speed, then there is the perception of speed. Crystal
| got this right.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Unfortunately for most users of most software, "losing
| interest" isn't really an option - they need it to do some job
| or other.
| jprete wrote:
| I get your point, but "losing interest" can also mean losing
| flow, because the user got interrupted for five seconds
| instead of instantly taking the next action in their mental
| plan.
|
| When apps have these kinds of interruptions all over the
| place, that's even worse than just having them at startup.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Recently I re-discovered my old collection of mp3s. I copied
| them to my laptop and started listening (using VLC). It blew me
| away how pleasant the experience was, particularly the overall
| responsiveness, navigating from track-to-track, skipping around
| in a track, stuff like that. I never really noticed the delays
| from streaming services until they were gone.
| dm319 wrote:
| I was just reading this week about someone trying to get their
| UHK keyboard to launch an application on Windows by producing a
| sequence of keys starting with the Windows key. They needed to
| put in a delay to get this to work, and it reminded me of my
| frustrations launching programs in Windows as the start menu
| takes its sweet and variable time. Not least because I know the
| technology has been focused on getting adverts into the start
| menu.
| viraptor wrote:
| That sounds terrible. Why interact with the start menu at all
| if you can just start the application itself through the
| path? That's the kind of abuse that delays things in the
| first place.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or this new version will just break... I had some nice weeks
| when the search just didn't work at all... While I was too
| lazy to restart the computer to fix it...
|
| Then again, I guess any other OS might break in same way.
| Like my Debian VM just kinda stops responding to part of the
| screen sometimes if programs are maximised...
| danuker wrote:
| Isn't there still the Run dialog, Win+R in newer versions of
| Windows?
| abwizz wrote:
| this is the way.
|
| but putting delay between events (not keystrokes) is
| nevertheless a good practice
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Thanks. I had forgot about that because the Windows key by
| itself was fast enough in Windows 7 that I stopped using
| Win+R.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| This is partly an OS design issue. There's no deep reason the
| OS should ever throw away keypresses, but contemporary GUIs
| have a very weak and flaky notion of focus. Contrast this
| with mainframe apps where users could learn to go incredibly
| fast, because keystrokes were buffered per connection and the
| mainframe would process them serially, so even if you typed
| faster than the machine could process them it wouldn't
| matter, no keys were lost.
| erwan577 wrote:
| The first step to solve a problem is to measure it. Do you know
| of a windows program that can measure the latency of the UI of
| other windows apps ?
|
| What really drives me mad is the latency of some file selection
| dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds.
| hulitu wrote:
| > What really drives me mad is the latency of some file
| selection dialogs for example which can take like 10 seconds.
|
| That's why the obfuscated it and now it takes 30 seconds.
| (Win 10). Unless you want to save on OneDrive.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can get lots of good information from ETW
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/drivers/d...
|
| There's also Dtrace https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page
| load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but
| has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there
| are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM.
| Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page
| content to move around.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has
| almost none of the data you need displayed.
|
| Which, in my mind, means it didn't load instantly. The page
| isn't loaded until all of the data is displayed.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even more annoying is when ads pop in a second or so later
| under the cursor position just before you click, taking you
| to the ad not what you wanted to click.
| palata wrote:
| Ads? I have a solution for ads... ever heard of uBlock
| Origin? :)
| porphyra wrote:
| And when you're about to click on something, something new
| loads and everything jumps unpredictably and you end up
| accidentally clicking on the wrong thing lol
| dghughes wrote:
| Yes, in Windows 50% of my day is fighting with something
| obscuring my view or taking focus. Something pops up just
| as I was clicking or pressing Enter. I have to sign into
| multiple systems in the morning and sometimes it takes four
| attempts to enter creds for one login because I keep
| getting interrupted. It's infuriating.
| smegger001 wrote:
| you would think they could figured out that programs not
| directly opened by the user shouldn't be able to steal
| focus from the program the user is currently interacting
| with. seems like basic UX/UI failure
| YoukaiCountry wrote:
| This is honestly the worst part of it to me. It happens
| quite a lot!
| danieldk wrote:
| This drives me crazy, especially because it breaks finding
| within a page. Eg. if you order food and you already know
| what you want.
|
| Old days: Cmd + f, type what you want.
|
| New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that all the
| contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what you want.
|
| Is just a list of dishes, some with small thumbnails, some
| without any images at all. If you can't load a page with 30
| dishes fast enough, you have a serious problem (you could
| always lazily load the thumbnails if you want to cheat).
| nzach wrote:
| >If you can't load a page with 30 dishes fast enough, you
| have a serious problem
|
| That depends on your scale. If your product is "large
| enough" it is relatively easy to get into the range of
| several seconds of response time.
|
| Here are some of the steps you may want to execute before
| responding a resquest to your user:
|
| - Get all the dishes that have the filters the user
| selected
|
| - Remove all dishes from restaurants that doen't delivery
| in the user location
|
| - Remove all dishes from restaurants that aren't open right
| now
|
| - Get all discount campaigns for the user and apply its
| effects for every dish
|
| - Reorder the dish list based on the history of the user
| interactions
|
| Now imagine that for every step in this list you have, at
| least, a single team of developers. Add some legacy
| requirements and a little bit of tech debt... That's it,
| now you have the perfect stage for a request that takes
| 5-10 seconds.
| bamfly wrote:
| Dafuq kind of scale could even a service for _lots_ of
| restaurants have, that that wouldn 't be a single query
| taking milliseconds to execute? I'd _maybe_ split the
| last bit (user history re-ordering) into another
| operation, but the rest, nah, not seeing it, one quick
| query, probably behind a view.
|
| I mean maybe your DB is a single node running on a potato
| and your load's very high but you're also somehow never
| hitting cache, but otherwise... no, there's no good
| reason for that to be slow.
|
| [EDIT] Your last paragraph is the reason, though: it's
| made extremely poorly. That'll do it.
| jerf wrote:
| None of the things you said mentioned should be hard. We
| did complicated things like that and more in the 1990s.
|
| _But it was different..._
|
| Yeah. It was. That's _exactly_ my point.
|
| A major problem is the number of places in our code
| stacks where developers _think_ it 's perfectly normal
| for things to take 50ms or 500ms that aren't. I am not a
| performance maniac but I'm always keeping a mental budget
| in my head for how long things should take, and if
| something that should be 50us takes 50ms I generally at
| some point dig in and figure out why. If you don't even
| _realize_ that something should be snappy you 'll never
| dig into why your accidentally quadratic code is as slow
| as it is.
|
| Another one I think is ever-increasingly to blame is the
| much celebrated PHP-esque "fully isolated page", where a
| given request is generated and then everything is thrown
| away. It was _always_ a performance disaster, but when
| you go from 1 request to dozens for the simplest page
| render it becomes extra catastrophic. A lot of my web
| sites are a lot faster than my fellow developers expect
| simply because I reject that as a model for page
| generation. Things are a lot faster if you 're only
| serving what was actually requested and not starting
| everything up from scratch.
|
| Relatedly, developers really underestimate
| precomputation, which is very relevant to your point.
| Your hypothetical page layout is slow because you waited
| until the user actually clicked "menu" to start
| generating all that. Why did you do that? You should have
| computed that all at login time and have it stored right
| at your fingertips, because it is a reasonable assumption
| given the sort of page you're talking about that if the
| user logged in, they are there to make an order, not to
| look at their credit card settings. Even if it expensive
| for reasons out of your control (location API, for
| instance) if you already did the work you can serve the
| user instantly.
|
| Having precomputed all this data, you might as well shove
| it all down to the client and let them manipulate it
| there with zero further network requests. A menu is a
| trivial amount of information.
|
| It isn't even like precomputation is hard. It's the same
| code, just running at a different time.
|
| "But what about when that doesn't work?" Well, you do
| something else. You've got a huge list of options. I
| haven't even scratched the surface. This isn't a treatise
| on how to speed up every conceivable website, this is a
| _cri de coeur_ to stop making excuses for not even
| trying, and just try a little.
|
| And it is SO MUCH FUN. Those of you who don't try you
| have no idea what you are missing out on. It is
| _completely normal_ on a code base no one has ever
| profiled before to find a 50ms process and improve it to
| 50us with just a handful of lines tweaked. It is
| _completely normal_ to examine a DB query taking 3
| seconds and find that with a single ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX
| cut that down to 2us. This is the most fun I have at
| work. Give it a try. It 's addictive!
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX, in some cases, can create speed
| increases in multiple orders of magnitude.
|
| I was using a SAST program that used MS SQL Server and
| was generating reports, and often finding the reports
| took HOURS to generate, even when the report was only ~50
| pages. A report on one specific project took over a DAY
| to generate a report. I thought it was ludicrous, so I
| logged onto the SQL server to investigate and found that
| one query was taking 99% of the time. This query was
| searching through a table with tens of millions of rows,
| but not indexed on the specific rows it was checking
| against, and many variations of the query were being used
| to generate the report. I added the index (Only took
| about an hour, IIRC), and what took hours now took a
| couple minutes.
|
| I was always surprised the software didn't create that
| index to begin with.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, your last point is totally spot on, it is _so
| gratifying_ to make something feel obviously much faster,
| in a way that few other things in programming are, and
| there 's usually a lot of low hanging fruit.
|
| Also, if you work on a website, the Google crawler seems
| to allocate a certain amount of wall time (not just CPU
| time) to crawling your page. If you can get your pages to
| respond extremely quickly, more of your pages will be
| indexed, and you're going to match for more keywords. So
| if for some reason people aren't convinced that speed is
| an important feature for users wanting to use your site,
| maybe SEO benefits will help make the case.
| vhcr wrote:
| Or even worse, Cmd + F doesn't work because the page is
| lazily rendered.
| pohuing wrote:
| Twitter does that and I don't understand why. Do they
| think their js blob can figure out which divs to render
| faster than the browser engine itself?
| RichardCA wrote:
| I am in no way a front-end person, but my understanding
| is that it has to do with React and the way it maintains
| a virtual copy of the DOM.
|
| Having Ctrl-F not work correctly is maddening and I hate
| it.
| sazz wrote:
| Well, the tech stack is insane: Some virtual machine
| running a web browser process running a virtual machine for
| a html renderer which consumes a document declaration
| language incorporating a scripting language to overcome the
| document limitations trying to build interactive programs.
|
| Actually much worse as Microsoft once did with their COM
| model, ActiveX based on MFC foundation classes with C++
| templates, etc.
|
| And to build those interactive programs somebody is trained
| to use React, Vue, etc. using their own eco systems of
| tools. This is operated by a stack of build tools, a stack
| of distribution tools, kubernetes for hosting and AWS for
| managing that whole damn thing.
|
| Oh - and do not talk even about Dependency Management,
| Monitoring, Microservices, Authorization and so on...
|
| But I really wonder - what would be more complex?
|
| Building interactive programs based on HTML or Logo (if
| anybody does remember)?
| syntheweave wrote:
| Well, the way in which we got there is in adding more
| features to the "obvious" answer: all any given site
| necessarily has to do, to have the same presentation as
| today, is place pixels on the screen, change the pixels
| when the user clicks or types things, and persist data
| somewhere as the user does things.
|
| Except...there's no model of precisely how text is
| handled or how to re-encode it for e.g. screen
| reading...the development model lacks the abstraction to
| do layout...and so on. So we added a longer pipeline with
| more things to configure, over and over.
|
| But - the computing environment is also different now. We
| can say, "aha, but OCR exists, GPT exists" and pursue a
| completely different way of presenting many of those
| features, where you leverage a higher grade of computing
| power to make the architectural line between the
| presentation layer and the database extremely short and
| weighted towards "user in control of their data and
| presentation". That still takes engineering and design,
| but the order of magnitude goes down, allowing complexity
| to bottleneck elsewhere.
|
| That's the kind of conceptual leap computing has made a
| few times over history - at first the idea of having the
| computer itself compile your program from a textual form
| to machine instructions ("auto-coding") was novel and
| complex. Nowadays we expect our compilers to make coffee
| for us.
| myth2018 wrote:
| And don't forget the UX designers armed with their figmas
| and alikes. The tech-stack is only one among a number of
| organizational and cultural issues crippling the field.
| atchoo wrote:
| Ironically these instant starting NT applications were
| often using COM.
|
| As much as I hated developing with COM, the application
| interoperability and OLE automation is a form 90s tech
| utopianism that I miss.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| On one project, I actually shifted quite recently from
| working on old-school, pre-Windows XP, DCOM-based
| protocols, to interfacing with REST APIs. Let me tell you
| this: compared to OpenAPI tooling, DCOM is a paradise.
|
| I have no first clue how anyone does anything with
| OpenAPI. Just about every tool I tried to turn OpenAPI
| specs into C or C++ code, or documentation, is horribly
| broken. And this isn't me "holding it wrong" - in each
| case, I found GitHub issues about those same failures,
| submitted months or years ago, and still open, on
| supposedly widely-used and actively maintained
| projects...
| pjmlp wrote:
| And then came WASM...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Virtual machines don't add much overhead.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| That may be so, although a VM on AWS is measurably slower
| than the same program running on my Xeon from 2013 or so.
|
| But, more generally, the problem is that tech _stacks_
| are an awful amalgamation of uncountable pieces which,
| taken by themselves, "don't add much overhead". But when
| you add them all together, you end up with a terribly
| laggy affair; see the other commenter's description of a
| web page with 30 dishes taking forever to load.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| My experience has been that HTML and making changes to
| HTML has huge amounts of overhead all by itself.
|
| I don't dispute that very bad javascript can cause
| problems, but I don't think it's the virtualization
| layers or the specific language that are responsible for
| more than a sliver of that in the vast majority of use
| cases.
|
| And the pile of build and distribution tools shouldn't
| hurt the user at all.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It's exactly the pile of layers, not "bad javascript" or
| any other single thing. Yes vms do add ridiculius
| overhead.
| jrott wrote:
| At this point there are so many layers that it would be
| hard to figure out the common problems without doing some
| serious work profiling a whole bunch of applications
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| When half the layers add up to 10% of the problem, and
| the other half of the layers add up to 90% of the
| problem, I don't blame layers in general. If you remove
| the parts that legitimately are just _bad_ by themselves,
| you solve most of the problems.
|
| If you have a dozen layers and they each add 5% slowdown,
| okay that makes a CPU half as fast. That amount of
| slowdown is nothing for UI responsiveness. A modern core
| clocked at 300MHz would blow the pants off the 600MHz
| core that's responding instantly in the video, and then
| it would clock 10x higher when you turn off the
| artificial limiter. Those slight slowdowns of layered
| abstractions are not the real problem.
|
| (Edit: And note that's not for a dozen layers total but
| for a dozen additional layers on top of what the NT code
| had.)
| sazz wrote:
| "But when you add them all together, you end up with a
| terribly laggy affair"
|
| I think this is the key.
|
| People fall in love with simple systems which solves a
| problem. Being totally in honey moon they want to use
| those systems for additional use cases. So they build
| stuff around it, atop of it, abstract the original system
| to allow growth for more complexity.
|
| Then the system becomes too complex, so people might come
| up with a new idea. So they create a new simple system
| just to fix a part of the whole stack and allow migration
| from the old one. The party starts all over again.
|
| But it's like hard drive fragmentation - at some point
| there are so many layers that it's basically impossible
| to recombine layers again. Everybody fears complexity
| already built.
| mikecoles wrote:
| I miss typing / to search on pages. Ctrl-W still messes me
| up at times when using a terminal in a browser.
| TechieKid wrote:
| You can search with / on Firefox.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| ' will search in URLs, skipping plain text.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Unless you're on github.com, because it rather
| inconsiderately takes over `/`.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Firefox allows you to use / to start a conventional
| search.
|
| As a bonus, in Firefox if you hit the ' key (apostrophe)
| you get a search that looks only within hyperlinks and
| ignores all the un-clickable plain text. Give it a try,
| sometimes it can be very useful
| dbtc wrote:
| vimium / vimium-ff
| abdusco wrote:
| Firefox lets you use / for search.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that
| all the contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what
| you want._
|
| Only to discover that 2/3 of the matches are invisible text
| that's put there for $deity knows what reason, and the rest
| only gives you the subset of what you want, as the UI
| truncates the list of ingredients/toppings and you need to
| click or hover over it to see it in full.
| timthorn wrote:
| > Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for
| page load time
|
| I don't disagree with your example, but optimising for page
| load time is as old as the graphical Web.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Yes, but back in the 90s the dominant idea was load the
| text as quickly as possible, then all the other junk can
| come later.
| omoikane wrote:
| I thought the thing to optimize for is "largest contentful
| paint", which is one of the weighted factors used by
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/
| leidenfrost wrote:
| There was a small accordion in some Google search results
| that opened around ~1 second after the results page was
| loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever.
| And we are talking about Google here.
| amaccuish wrote:
| The one where you would go to click on the first result and
| it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and
| you'd end up somewhere else?
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| My guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse
| text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That
| delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab
| their attention.
|
| For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse
| information without really needing to read much of the
| text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed
| my wife reading google results and she is much slower and
| more methodical, probably because she doesn't google
| things 20+ times a day every day like I do.
|
| That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working
| at the speed of a normal googler.
|
| It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks
| you can make using browser extensions to make that
| disappear if you're so inclined.
| ballenf wrote:
| I really could see Apple adopting an approach from FPS
| games, where the phone applies a click to what was under
| your finger 1/4 second-ish instead of what's there when
| the click is recognized. Time-travel clicking.
|
| But the real solution is better web page design.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you
| accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
| michaelt wrote:
| We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces
| maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision
| making? /s
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly
| deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.
| p_l wrote:
| Worse, sometimes the people who do it are completely
| unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see
| the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's
| superior to what they think.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The ultimate version of this was done by Optimizely some
| years ago, where - let's assume here unintentional - bad
| UI design encouraged people to terminate their A/B tests
| early when the metrics favored the new version, leading
| to people without good understanding of statistics
| implementing dark patterns (or just stupid patterns),
| blissfully unaware that they've biased their own A/B
| tests so strongly that they could just as well be
| replaced by a piece of paper with words "NEW THING WORKS
| BETTER" written on it.
| polyvisual wrote:
| My goodness, that accordion needs to removed from their
| code base immediately.
|
| A horrific piece of UI/UX/engineering/whatever.
| rkagerer wrote:
| That one ALWAYS foils me and I hate it and whoever created
| it.
| azemetre wrote:
| I'm sure the person who wrote that accordion is quite good
| at solving leetcode tho! (only half joking)
| Fatnino wrote:
| Their new AI shit on the top of the sesrch results does
| this. It's slow AF and I'll sometimes have scrolled partway
| down the page before it farts a huge blob of text up top
| and pushes stuff I've already scrolled past back down past
| my finger.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I could kind of understand things moving around back in the
| 2000s when we were all getting used to AJAX but all these
| years later can we (at least) have the main navigation links
| stay still?
| asah wrote:
| jfyi this is not new - we confronted this in 1996 when the
| web was very young.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Trying to meet a specific threshold is part of the problem. The
| better the development hardware, the earlier that threshold is
| met in testing, which tends to mean optimization effort falls
| off a cliff.
|
| Also that threshold is an entire 400ms. We should expect
| significantly better than that these days.
| bee_rider wrote:
| OTOH I recall alt-tabbing full screen games (Warcraft 3 on a
| single core machine is a specific memory) and then sitting back
| for a while...
|
| Office suites have never been good, but office suites in like
| 2005 seemed to stretch systems to the breaking point.
|
| Lots of consumer software has always sucked out of the box, I
| guess if you are here you were possibly a technically savvy kid
| at some point, is it possible that you were just more selective
| about the types of programs you ran when you were using the
| computer for fun?
| anaisbetts wrote:
| Most games don't need to change screen resolutions anymore
| which is the expensive bit since not only do you have to wait
| for the hardware to settle, you have to throw out basically
| everything in GPU memory and reset it all
| atq2119 wrote:
| Also, having to throw out basically everything in GPU
| memory is largely a thing of the past in the first place.
|
| I still have this instinctual reluctance to change screen
| resolution in a game's setting screen, even though 99% of
| the time it's an instantaneous thing these days.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Back then you ran games in proper fullscreen mode, whereas
| nowadays you run them in windowed mode (even when it's called
| fullscreen windowed).
|
| If you get bad performance in a game nowadays it's a good
| idea to try proper fullscreen. Alt tabbing might be slow, but
| the game will run better.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Old text word processors on my 286/386 back in the late 80s /
| early 90s, ran just fine. Instant everything. Only thing that
| was truly slow was the scanner.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS has entered the chat.
|
| I have fond memories of that, but basically the editor was
| a UI into a linked list with a blue screen. So not
| comparable to what people are being asked to do with Word
| and 365 today.
|
| My personal beef with Word is that it struggles so much
| with long documents. Trying to read, say, a 300 page spec
| from 3GPP is miserable.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because the user would rather wait a minute to load Photoshop,
| than have MS Paint that loads instantly.
| ObscureScience wrote:
| Note that modern versions of MS Paint (with few improvements
| over the original) takes seconds to load on a quad core 3+ghz
| machine, loaded from an SSD.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This is what happens when you have a leaning tower of
| abstractions, with each layer being developed with a philosophy
| of, "it's good enough". Some performance loss is unavoidable
| when you're adding layers, but that aforementioned attitude of
| indifference has a multiplicative effect which dramatically
| increases losses. By the time you get to the endpoint, the
| losses snowball into something rather ridiculous.
| LanceH wrote:
| Along those lines, I have numerous clients who just want
| plain Ruby on Rails -- no react front end. They are all
| business to business, or at least professional users on the
| end. They just want their data loaded and to work with it.
|
| Ruby on Rails may not be the poster child for speediness as
| things get big or complex, but if you aren't fighting the
| ORM, it's consistently quick from click to data.
|
| Also, RoR is definitely not dead.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Ruby on Rails is plenty fast, especially with Turbo. The
| biggest RoR speed drop is n+1 queries imo.
| viraptor wrote:
| Which is not a RoR issue. You get those accidentally if
| you write plain SQL as well. (Actually passing the AR
| query fragments makes the n+1 easier to avoid in complex
| situations)
| Arwill wrote:
| Each level of abstraction has its own caching and buffering
| routines because the underlying layers are slow, and without
| the ability to make them better, you can only put your own
| cache on top of it. This helps initially, but in the end, the
| time goes wasted managing all those caches and buffers at
| every given layer.
| dumdumchan wrote:
| The reason is backward compatibility. Each win32 api call has
| hundreds of extraneous conditionals handling edge cases for
| the purpose of backwards compatibility. That's just the price
| of being able to run ancient executables on new OS. GNU/Linux
| doesn't worry about that and everything opens instantaneously
| on it.
| the_overseer wrote:
| Is this missing an /s?
| zackees wrote:
| Yeah 10 browser tabs on brave my ubuntu grinds to a halt.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| If you disable the virus scanner and write a simple SDL app
| on Windows it will open instantly as well.
| [deleted]
| mydriasis wrote:
| Not gonna lie, my memory serves me well. I remember using Windows
| 98 on an old PC, and it was _hot garbage_. It took generations to
| boot up, and applications took generations to open. My story is
| anecdata, but so it this twitter post. These days I have an
| infinitely snappy experience with desktop linux on an SSD.
| dehrmann wrote:
| SSDs and adequate memory were the two things that happened
| where PCs finally started feeling snappy.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Another anecdote: I fixed up a computer running vista for a
| secretary once. It had been running with a hard disk and
| would take upwards of a minute to load. After replacing the
| HDD with an SSD, it booted so fast that you got thrown onto
| the desktop and all of the "startup sounds" played all at
| once, the system seemingly booting faster than it could cope
| with!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| PCs were incredibly snappy before SSDs, and didn't need much
| RAM at all. Gnome 1.4 was like lightning, whereas KDE was
| noticeably slower.
|
| You don't need fast hardware to have snappy apps. Most of the
| microcontrolled devices you deal with day to day are clocked
| between 4 and 25MHz. Hard drives are only needed to access
| files once and load them into memory, and microcontrolled
| devices have like 256kB-4mB of memory. The _only_ reason apps
| aren 't snappy is programmers fail to make proper use of the
| hardware and OS.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| A good way to reality check this is to think about how
| frequently we saw loading splash screens then vs now. Back then
| it was common. Office suites, IDEs, browsers, pretty much any
| non-trivial app would show you a splash screen whilst it
| loaded. Some even had progress bars in the splash screens.
| Nowadays even web apps don't have splashes (though you could
| argue that grey loading flashers are the modern equivalent).
| bink wrote:
| Many of those apps switched from using splash screens to pre-
| loading in the background.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Which ones?
| thewebcount wrote:
| Many web pages have loading progress bars. They're usually
| only 1-2 pixels thick and take up the entire top 1-2 rows of
| pixels on the page. Some stuff loads asynchronously, so it
| can be easy to miss them, but I see them all the time. Just
| today, I was using Jenkins and it does that!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| A lot of that was simply down to how _slow_ hard drives were
| back then. I can not overstate what a miracle of performance
| it is jumping from a 7200RPM (or 5400!) HD to today 's solid
| state storage. Tens of thousands of times faster in many
| cases.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| NT kernels were always better than the DOS-based hot garbage of
| 95, 98, and ME.
|
| Windows 2000 is my all-time favorite Windows OS. NT-based
| kernel, literally nothing extra, fast, stable. Used it til the
| day support was finally shuttered.
| nullindividual wrote:
| GDI+ was slower due to the alpha transparency than GDI in
| NT4.
| hosteur wrote:
| Any way to legally obtain win2k iso now? I lost my discs from
| that era and would like to run it in a VM.
| majormajor wrote:
| I'd like to see them open Photoshop or something chunky. That's
| what I recall taking much longer on my G3 Macs than it does on my
| M1 Pro Macbook.
|
| They should probably run some sort of antivirus too; this is
| built-in for Windows now, ya? That'd be my first guess for the
| small programs. My memory of those days doesn't feel any faster
| than today, but I never had anything as top-of-the-line as a
| 600Mhz chip in 1999, more like half of that.
| 762236 wrote:
| It is such a pain to write Win32 code that you didn't have time
| to add all the features that would slow down program launch.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| As cynical as this comment may be, there may be an element of
| truth to it. If it is time consuming to add a bunch of visual
| effects and transitions, you aren't likely to spend time doing
| that if you could instead be adding useful features.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Most software is not developed by a single person and adding
| animations have very little overlap with most functionality,
| so it is almost completely parallelizable.
| pkphilip wrote:
| I know you probably meant it in jest but as someone who wrote a
| bunch of desktop apps at one time, it was actually easier to
| develop desktop apps in tools like Delphi in the 1990s than it
| is to develop apps now.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| But, Delphi existed mostly because of the terrible default
| Microsoft DX. Writing pure Win32 was indeed pretty awful (and
| still is).
| matwood wrote:
| For me, VB6 was the pinnacle of Windows desktop app
| development. When I first starting building web sites/apps it
| was such a huge step backwards.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Try Xojo Web, pretty neat tool with VB like web builder.
| javajosh wrote:
| It was/is a huge step backwards in terms of DX, but an
| infinite step forward for distribution. Distribution is the
| ONLY problem, which is why the shift happened.
| throw7 wrote:
| Simple answer: It's abstractions all the way down.
|
| With an old machine, you can feel the "slowness" doing a similar
| test with something coded in assembly vs compiled.
|
| The reality is, to be fast, do less.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Abstraction is maybe the incidental reason start up is slow but
| the real reason is because no one cares.
|
| You don't toggle apps open and closed so an initial wait to
| load up more features just isn't a priority.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This isn't exactly a fair comparison. When Windows 3.1 was
| released, that machine would have seemed like an absolute
| _monster_. (Remember when Moore 's Law actually got us speed
| improvements, not just more cores?)
|
| Regardless, to answer "what happened?", people started demanding
| more from apps (dark mode, UI parity with web editions, rapid
| prototyping, simple development, cross-platform) and it became
| cheaper to use Electron (or Qt, or WinForms) than simple win32
| calls.
| Dwedit wrote:
| "Dark Mode" isn't a resource hog. Even back in Windows 3.1, you
| could customize the colors. Hot Dog Stand anyone?
| sgt wrote:
| There should be a CSS framework for Hot Dog Stand. Such a
| marvel!
|
| Screenshot: https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uplo
| ads/2005/07...
| rfwhyte wrote:
| There's always a brief window in time with any new technology
| where it's new enough that the suits haven't entirely gotten
| their hooks into it, so it's broadly made to be as effective as
| possible at doing what it's supposed to do. We unfortunately now
| live well down the enshitification curve of computing and now
| most everything is made not simply to be as good as possible at
| it's intended purpose, but rather to make the companies that make
| it is as much money as possible while performing it's intender
| purpose at whatever minimum standard will annoy users ever so
| slightly less than the amount it would require them to stop
| paying money for it.
| classified wrote:
| What happened? Ads, surveillance, virus scanners. And webshit.
| kaivi wrote:
| Can someone recommend a modern Linux DM/WM and maybe a set of
| applications which would be as responsive?
|
| I have been running a bare XMonad for a couple of years with
| `xset r rate 300 40`, and it's okay but far from perfect. The WM
| seems to process its mouse events with a delay sometimes, and
| often focuses the wrong window whenever the mouse pointer moves.
| qart wrote:
| I have been a Linux single-booter since at least 15 years, and
| have used a wide variety of DM/WM as my primaries for years.
| All my biases are in favour of Linux.
|
| I don't think I've ever had the mouse event delay issues that
| you're talking about, and I don't use focus-follows-mouse. But
| I still marvel at how quickly light programs open on all
| versions of Windows. I mean programs like terminal, notepad,
| various control panel stuff, MS default games, etc. I don't
| think you will find anything that runs on X that will be as
| responsive as Windows. I don't know if the Wayland universe is
| any better.
| bitwize wrote:
| Equivalent light apps (e.g., xterm) come up near
| instantaneously for me. Even Emacs opens in just a few
| hundred ms.
|
| Back in the day when I was rocking a Pentium, it impressed me
| how God damn FAST X was. Windows NT (3.51 and 4.0) seemed
| sluggish in comparison.
| nunez wrote:
| Windows NT 3.51 min specs: 25MHz CPU, 16MB memory (for the server
| edition), 90MB disk space
|
| Windows 11 min specs: 1GHz 64-bit CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64GB disk space.
|
| This is a horribly unfair comparison. We were complaining about
| systems being slow AF back then too. (Insert _turbo button_ meme
| here)
| blablabla123 wrote:
| That's true, during the time I had a 486 SX 33 with 4 MB and
| 200 MB HDD. Windows 3.1 ran fine, I tried OS/2 Warp and it was
| unbearably slow. Never tested Windows 95 on that computer but
| of course NT was completely out-of-reach. On the other hand
| "NT" was unusable for anything fun until XP.
|
| Still, there's a point to make about bloat but the comparison
| seems to be between Apples and Oranges
| anthk wrote:
| Windows 2000 used to run lots of games.
|
| Also, you have a compat mode for w95/98 a la Windows XP
| prompt, but only for desktop shortcuts.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You could play SNES games with zero loading screens. And it was
| awesome.
|
| Now, loading screens are everywhere. Like the Atari + cassette
| era.
| bitwize wrote:
| That hardware is a few generations ahead of even high-end server
| hardware when Windows NT 3.51 dropped. Of course, any OS is going
| to be snappy when running on much faster hardware with much more
| RAM than it was designed for.
|
| Put Windows 2000 on that thing and see if it runs just as well.
| Narishma wrote:
| They did exactly that if you scroll a bit down. It's just as
| fast as Windows NT 3.51.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Not just that, the transition from spinners to SSD brought a
| dramatic speed in the OSs of that day but the speed gain has
| since been rolled back by the garbage layers in the OS. A prime
| example is macOS which gets slower with each release and it's a
| tragic level of neglect that there are no mandatory equivalent
| tests to the last OS release.
| elenaferrantes wrote:
| In France in conforama stores salesman use a ascii terminal GUI
| connected to AIX shells. Fast as hell to take your order. I'm
| always amazed at how marketing BS lead us to vastly sub optimal
| solution.
| verall wrote:
| A lot of people are bringing up Wirth's law or other things, but
| I want to get more specific.
|
| Has anyone else noticed how bad sign-on redirect flows have
| gotten in the past ~5 years?
|
| It used to be you clicked sign in, and then you were redirected
| to a login page. Now I typically see my browser go through 4+
| redirects, stuck at a white screen for 10-60 seconds.
|
| I'm a systems C++ developer and I know nothing about webdev. Can
| someone _please_ fill me in on what's going on here and how every
| single website has this new slowness?
| billyjobob wrote:
| A lot of sites now don't even a "sign in" now. You only have a
| large "sign up" button, which you have to click, and _then_ in
| very small text at the bottom of the sign up screen find the
| link for "already have an account?"
| pessimizer wrote:
| Nobody wants you to ever turn a device off, or to ever log
| out of a website.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Web UX designers need to find some alternative button label
| that users understand means both "Sign up" and "Sign in". The
| site will know if your email address has an account and
| should then be asked does a password. Though users will still
| complain that the login process requires two steps: entering
| a username and then the backend determining whether to next
| serve a password or registration form.
| guntars wrote:
| Needing a bunch of JavaScript to make it work, which will
| get bungled by the devs and break it for people using
| password managers, making the thing even worse. Login is
| such a common pattern that it should be just handled by the
| browser.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Good point. It's unfortunate that HTTP Auth never become
| popular. I don't know if that was because the browser
| support or UX was bad or if web developers wanted more
| control over their sites' login flow or user information
| required.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Authentica...
| r00fus wrote:
| I guess you're supposed to bookmark the deep link that goes
| to your dashboard then let it send you to the Interstitial
| login page.
|
| Bad UX though.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Guilty of implementing this exact thing only the other month.
|
| "We" just assume that anyone who has already signed up will
| always be signed in.
| verall wrote:
| I haven't figured this one out either - why show the user how
| difficult it will be to use _before_ they sign up? That 's
| supposed to be for after.
| Solvency wrote:
| Don't you see? All that matters is those tasty conversions.
| They want your email. They want your conversion. What's that?
| You've converted already and want to login? Sorry, we've got
| more conversions to drive, can't be bothered.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I worked with a designer that actually told me this un-
| sarcastically. "My KPI is signups, not logins. Bury the
| login link. Existing users don't move the metric."
|
| Metrics-based and KPI-based software development has ruined
| quality for decades.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I've split tickets into smaller chunks because the number
| of tickets closed was my KPI at the time.
|
| It's dumb and current me would just say that out loud and
| not participate in this circus.
| guestbest wrote:
| I wish sites only wanted email. Mostly they want to
| integrate with Google, Facebook and require a phone number.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I'm waiting for the day when we see an article about some
| government tax or bill-pay portal that only works with
| Facebook and Google login, no email.
| guestbest wrote:
| If you want to even more dystopian, imagine every
| separate account is taxed on every forum/chat apo and
| failure to report is tax fraud.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There are already some essential services that use
| ReCaptcha and require you to be stalked by Google and be
| on good standing with them.
| aimor wrote:
| I pay my water bill on my phone using cellular data because
| some part of the sign-in process hits an address that's blocked
| by the adblock DNS I use.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is the worst. You can't even click an internal site link
| anymore without being redirected through several scummy
| third-party domains, so that some knucklehead product manager
| can claim that they are tracking "engagement" and show off
| "metrics" to their upper managers.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is also a security and GDPR liability, if only it was
| enforced.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Google and Microsoft are the worst for this. When you sign on
| you can see it flashing through several of their products,
| signing you on in each, before finally redirecting you to
| wherever you intended to go.
|
| It might be done for user retention reasons with the idea that
| people are more likely to use sites they're already signed
| into, but I really don't need to be signed into YouTube when I
| sign into my Google work account. Please just skip that and
| sign in a few seconds quicker.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Modern browsers heavily restrict cookies. The redirect chain
| right after login, that takes you through all subdomains, is
| a way to evade cookie restrictions if your sites use
| different domains.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| It's because Microsoft and Google are the two largest
| identity providers around. Microsoft has M365 logins that can
| be configured with about 12 different authentication systems,
| as well as the various services like outlook.com, Hotmail
| etc. It has to check the login against those systems and then
| redirect you to that system.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Google does it to set all the appropriate
| cookies on the right domains. Microsoft probably has similar
| redirect flows.
|
| You can either do the redirects all at once on login or do
| them once you use the service first. Since login is already a
| time-consuming process (username, next, password, next, 2FA,
| next) I think you may as well take a second to add the
| redirects and be done with it.
|
| It doesn't make much sense for Google work accounts but it
| makes sense if those are a minority on the platform. They
| could definitely patch this out, but then again the login
| process is something that takes a second extra every month or
| so, so who really cares.
|
| What does bother me is how every service wants you to enter
| your username and password separately now. Autofill gets
| confused and sometimes even stops working because the stupid
| hidden input fields for the password don't get shown until
| you click the magical "next" button, just in case you need a
| special third party auth service.
|
| Either decide that work accounts are important and take out
| the extra YouTube redirect, or decide they aren't important
| and let me fill in my username and password on a single form.
| Both make complete sense individually but combined they're
| just a massive waste of time.
| tracker1 wrote:
| When I've done login screens, I usually also include a
| hidden password field so that the password manager can
| autofill... this way, it's already filled when the password
| field is visible after clicking "next". It's at least an
| improvement to the workflow for those of us using a
| password manager.
|
| Explaining it to the SecOps person, that was painful
| though.
| MatmaRex wrote:
| Some of it has to do with changes to browsers' acceptance of
| cookies. If you need to set cookies on multiple domains you
| control (common for SSO), you used to be able to do it by
| loading a pixel image or tiny script from each domain. Now,
| however, that's considered a third-party cookie, and rejected
| by many browsers. The only reliable way now is to redirect the
| whole page, and then redirect back.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Ten years ago I worked at a very large cloud company and I
| spent a lot of time wrestling with the various login flows. I
| remember seeing a flowchart that documented over 100 service
| calls that happen in the course of the 4 redirects that took
| place during a login.
| marklar423 wrote:
| That would be OAuth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth.
|
| It's a standard meant for system A to authenticate a user with
| system B. Ever logged in to a website with your Google account,
| or seen those permission screens asking you if you want to
| allow a third party website to access your Google account?
| That's OAuth.
|
| Now, as to why many websites do this even when you login with
| credentials for that system (and not third party auth) - my
| guess is the system has separate teams for each subsystem, each
| hosted on different subdomains. In order to transfer auth state
| from one subdomain to another, you need something like OAuth
| since cross-domain cookies are forbidden by the browsers.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Could be anything from a SPA that has to be reloaded entirely
| to loading a ton of 3rd party JS to work with all those login
| with options.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| I use Firefox containers with Temporary Containers
| (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-
| con...) so oh boy do I deal with this a lot. With some hacking
| I can stop the page at the right time to make it 'always open
| in X container' - there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to
| glob for different subdomains.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| My university portal login flow (Microsoft login via university
| SSO), frequently has me log in with password+2fa+nag screen to
| use microsoft authenticator, just to then randomly fail and
| have me do the entire thing again. It is infuriating,
| especially since any login cookies appear to only be valid for
| 1-2 days _per device_.
|
| I suspect that the amount of time I spend on just logging in to
| websites each day is upwards of 5 minutes, and I doubt it will
| decrease over the coming decades. Such a waste.
| nullindividual wrote:
| First issue is likely solvable by your IT department by
| looking through the AAD sign-in logs for your activity.
|
| The second is because authentication is per-device (and
| depending on the scenario, per-app). The token lifetime is
| configured by your IT department. Microsoft's default is 365
| days, if I recall.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The sad part is that we have an OS-managed standard for SSO
| called Kerberos, successfully used as part of Microsoft Active
| Directory, and for which most mainstream OSes still include
| support. This allows any application on your machine to inherit
| that auth without ever seeing a single login screen.
|
| While it can't easily be used cross-companies (and thus why
| SAML/OIDC exists), it's perfect for internal company
| infrastructure, and SAML/OIDC can still be handled somewhat
| seamlessly by having a minimal service that verifies your
| Kerberos identity and immediately dispatches you back to
| whatever third-party service you wanted to authenticate to,
| with no intermediate login pages or even any kind of UI (this
| service doesn't need UI because your authentication is managed
| via Kerberos for which your OS provides the UI).
|
| The problem is that you can't make money (nor "growth &
| engagement") off stable, battle-tested stuff that already
| exists and happily works in the background, so Okta/etc
| shareholders need to peddle _worse_ solutions that waste
| everyone 's time and processing power.
| pzlarsson wrote:
| SSO can seem intimidating to someone new to authentication
| implementations. I think this is in part because it is a bit
| complicated but also because it is an inherently invisible
| technology which we dont need think about as users. Sign in
| with fb/google on the other hand is something we all see in
| our day to day business and have at least some kind of mental
| picture of how it works. We've also seen it used as
| authentication for otherwise poorly implemented services so
| we might think that "since they managed to use it, how hard
| can it be?". Hence, a lot of developers and product owners
| choose those instead of SSO.
| mikecoles wrote:
| I think "successfully bastardized" as part of their embrace,
| extend, extinguish campaign is more accurate.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Kerberos relies on line of sight to the TGS. In the '90s and
| '00s, this was common place. As of COVID, less so.
|
| Kerberos is also difficult to administer and secure (Golden
| Ticket?). Kerberos also requires the target service be a
| member of the Kerberos Realm (or otherwise trusted) which
| again means line of sight between the service and TGS or
| Realm to Realm.
|
| And then we get into the whole ticket size issue.
|
| Kerberos is not a good candidate for web-based AuthN.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Kerberos relies on line of sight to the TGS
|
| Isn't this the same with any SSO provider? The SSO provider
| must be reachable by the end-user's browser during any
| authentication operation.
|
| (in case of KB it must be reachable by the target services
| too, but in a server-to-server environment it's less of an
| issue)
|
| > Golden Ticket
|
| Isn't this exactly the same to let's say a session cookie
| of a web-based IdP?
|
| The IdP _could_ apply policies on its backend that bind the
| cookie to a given IP address, user-agent or other
| indicators, but can 't this also be done for Kerberos
| tickets using a server-side middleware on every service you
| wish to access (since KB is internal-only, it shouldn't be
| that big of a deal)?
| nullindividual wrote:
| > Isn't this the same with any SSO provider?
|
| Yes, but OAuth has one major upside: HTTPS only.
|
| No one wants to create site-to-site VPN networks to flow
| Kerberos.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Isn't Kerberos explicitly designed to run over untrusted
| networks and not require any additional transport
| encryption?
|
| You could argue that the common implementations are large
| piles of legacy C with questionable memory safety that
| could open them to exploitation by malicious actors, but
| that's an implementation detail rather than the protocol
| itself - and I believe there's at least one (mostly?)
| memory-safe implementation in Java called Apache Kerby.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| The last time I logged in to AWS, the process went something
| like this, I may have left out or mistaken a step or two:
|
| Go to login page
|
| Solve capcha to get to login prompt
|
| Enter user name, get sent to next page
|
| Enter password
|
| Enter MFA code
|
| Failed, try resynching MFA token
|
| Repeat login process
|
| Failed, try rescynching MFA token again
|
| Failed, repeat login process and then go to troubleshoot MFA
| link on mfa page
|
| Enter password again
|
| Go to altternative factors link
|
| Click link to send verification email
|
| Didn't get email, click link again
|
| Click link in verification email
|
| Click link on login page to get a phone call with a code
|
| Get a call but it doesn't give me a code, try again
|
| Still no code, try again
|
| Get a code this time from the call but the code fails
| verification, try again
|
| Get a code and it gets verified, sends me to a login page
|
| Solve a capcha
|
| Enter username and password, get logged in
|
| Fortunately, I have found a solution to ensure this series of
| issues does not reoccur.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| OMG Yes. At my megacorp I work at they have this internal
| HR/401k site thing. I think it goes through 30+ redirects to
| get anywhere. It's INSANE. We have something called "Pitstop"
| and clicking on the list of tickets takes 30s+ to load.
| verall wrote:
| My record is Jira successfully loading a page in around 8
| minutes. It seriously sat on a white screen for 8 minutes,
| then boom there's the page - no interaction or F5. What on
| earth could it have been doing for that long??
| mschuster91 wrote:
| IME that's usually because:
|
| - the database and/or the Tomcat server have way too low
| RAM and start swapping like no end
|
| - way too many people had admin access in Jira and
| installed a metric shit ton of plugins
|
| - the AD configuration is messed up and instead of only
| user accounts it loads (and verifies) tens of thousands of
| user and machine accounts at each login
| verall wrote:
| It's probably the plugins, but even then I would have
| assumed that timeouts would have made it impossible to
| load a page that slow.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Given that people absolutely _love_ to upload multi-GB
| files to Jira (and will nag the admins to disable
| timeouts and size limit), many admins have long since
| relented...
|
| After all, why pay for an expensive DMS when you have
| Jira?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Jira is a horrible app though. I don't understand why it's
| so popular.
|
| Worse thing is the only reason we have to use it is to log
| our hours. Because the CIO wanted us to be "agile".
| Apparently logging ones hours in Jira makes us "agile".
| Yeah I don't know how either. Someone ticked a nice box
| there for themself. Now we're just creating a useless swamp
| of data that has no meaning because there are no guidelines
| on how to log everything. Normally when you implement the
| full process that stuff is straightforward because you have
| things in other places in Jira to link to. Not in this
| case. The only thing we have achieved is making Atlassian a
| bit richer.
|
| The same with "cloud". We had to be "on cloud". So what do
| they do? Migrate every physical server. Every time we need
| a new "server", we still have to fill in the same 18-page
| excel sheet. Only the tab with the physical rack location
| has been replaced with one with AWS locations. We still
| have the delay of several weeks of approvals and everything
| runs 24/7, nothing scales automatically or is auto
| provisioned. This is not "cloud". This is fooling oneself.
| And paying too much. We're technically in the cloud but we
| don't take advantage of anything it's actually good at.
| Paying only for resources we actually use? Nope. Auto
| scaling demand? Nope. Quick provisioning? Lol you wish. And
| we can't because the infrastructure architect team has
| locked everything down so nothing can be automated. They
| only trust themselves to that as they are the high priests.
|
| It's really time for megacorps to stop trying to be like a
| startup. It doesn't work, unless you basically rebuild the
| entire org from the ground up. Which will never happen
| because it will disrupt too much. Too much legacy, too many
| strings attached to "the business". Too many processes that
| will never be changed because it means the entire org would
| have to change.
|
| Just work with what you have and improve that instead of
| trying to pretend you're something else.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Jira redefines how slow and clunky a piece of software can
| be. It reliably takes 15 seconds to update an issue. Even
| when doing a mass update, 15 seconds per issue, the whole
| way.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Hell, Microsoft managed to "login loop" me multiple times on
| Firefox, where it ended up infinite redirects until some
| limit (browser?) were hit.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Commonly happens on Outlook here.
| matwood wrote:
| It's the SSO and the prolific usage of 3rd party auth
| providers. There's probably also a check in there to make sure
| you're not a bot.
|
| So while all the redirects are annoying, they are probably
| better than all the hand rolled auth that failed in various
| ways.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It's SSO, which communicates via tons and tons of redirects
| JohnFen wrote:
| I never use SSO mechanisms, but I see this same problem.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| The app still needs to check if your email is using SSO or
| is federated. And even then some apps use internal SSO to
| tie different systems together.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's not really an excuse - you really only need 3 page
| loads:
|
| * initial page provided by the service you're logging into -
| this gets your email address so it can lookup your account
| and determine which SSO provider to redirect to
|
| * actual login page served by your SSO provider - here you
| authenticate to the SSO provider. It can occasionally cause
| another page load to get your 2FA code if configured, or go
| through further identity checks
|
| * final "page" that consumes the query parameters sent back
| by the SSO provider - this is often just a 302 redirect to
| the home page but sets a session cookie.
|
| The main problem is that all these pages are super bloated,
| with tons of unnecessary JS and BS. All the code for login
| page that takes a username and password should be able to fit
| entirely on an A4 sheet of paper - it's literally just an
| HTML form and a few lines of CSS.
|
| Furthermore, even beyond inter-company SSO, there are shitty
| companies out there which use such flows _internally_ even
| though everything is part of the same security domain, hosted
| on the same infrastructure and thus can be hosted on the same
| top-level domain and use a single session cookie. Microsoft
| is a pretty bad one - Teams for example will use a redirect
| to some other Microsoft-owned domain to get your (already
| existing) Office 365 session; this is completely unnecessary,
| they can host all those things on the same top-level domain
| and reuse a single session cookie seamlessly.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This is the correct answer.
|
| If anyone thinks you need more redirects than this, I'd
| really like to know what more you think is necessary.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Because we never decommissioned the old auth server fully
| and we have to serve some of the page on a separate
| domain. Oh and the landing page URI has changed. Also we
| need to send you to a certain locale. And on and on..
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's SSO, which communicates via tons and tons of
| redirects_
|
| Not always. AT&T goes through about 25 redirects to sign in.
| No SSO involved.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Are you sure?
| nullindividual wrote:
| It's SSO behind the scenes between services within ATTs
| environment. It's just not "SSO" to you, the end user.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| I am using xfce with a minimal set of services and all the system
| apps and most others open instantly. Alt+tab is also always
| instant. It is an MS, Apple, Gnome/KDE problem, not modern
| computers one.
| roomey wrote:
| Absolutely, after using xfce for years I find windows very
| frustrating to use, to the point I can see my colleagues using
| it and I can see the lag they just think is normal.
|
| Imagine if you work on computers for hours everyday what the
| cumulative impact is
| cptskippy wrote:
| How much of that latency is down to DWM (the compositor) doing
| fancy transitions? It seems like there's at least a 1/4 second
| dedicated to the grow/fade in.
|
| If you search the startmenu for "advanced system settings" it
| will pull up a control panel era System Properties app with an
| Advanced > Performance option. Turning off visual effects there
| dramatically increases responsiveness.
| Solvency wrote:
| And yesterday I was mercilessly downvoted for saying VSCode is
| slow compared to software from decades ago.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| I'll have to agree to disagree. In my experience IDEs are the
| one type of software that were always slow, Eclipse is two
| decades old, and it's slowness was on a whole different level.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| I guess you never heard of Sublime text?
| atchoo wrote:
| Visual Studio 6 was very fast even on my PoS machine at the
| time.
|
| Faster than Jetbrains on an M1. Not used VS for a while but
| holy shit that crapped the bed in 2002 performance wise.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| I remember differently, I remember visual studio 6 bringing
| my PC to is knees (although to be fair I was a broke
| student and my PC was a potato).
| cmcaleer wrote:
| At least you're getting a lot for that, though I don't love
| Electron either. What does notepad.exe of today have over
| notepad.exe of 25 years ago? UTF-8 I guess. Not sure if find
| and replace was a thing in the olden days. Better line ending
| support too. I'm really wracking my brains here to think of
| stuff
| toast0 wrote:
| Line numbers came in with XP, I think.
| c00lio wrote:
| Misunderstood or intentionally misapplied "wisdom" like
| "premature optimisation is the root of all evil".
|
| Programmer comfort, unified frameworks, higher level languages
| over user experience.
|
| Focus on end users instead of professional users.
|
| Stupider programmers and programming through "good enough",
| "everyone can code" and "salaries are too high, hire someone
| cheaper".
|
| Computers getting cheaper, therefore users buying new machines to
| run software faster, instead of programmers trying to get stuff
| running fast on current hardware.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, and there is never, ever time to go back and address the
| weaknesses of the initial fast and dirty approach. If you prove
| out a product, it's proved, and any further work addressing
| tech debt is pure overhead, from the perspective of the
| business. Like so many problems, the ultimate solution is large
| scale collapse. We are now open to a super-virus that renders
| all of our (internet connected) compute worthless, or worse.
| It's a good opportunity to learn a trade, like carpentry,
| pottery or (pre-2005) auto repair.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Only Windows has this issue. There's nothing about my Mac or my
| Chromebook that is anything less than immediate. You can quibble
| about whether the compositor introducing an extra frame of
| latency was worth the tradeoff, but that is on the margins.
| spatulon wrote:
| The Mac is no better, in my experience. I just timed how long
| it takes to open the Calculator app - the simplest app I could
| think of - on my 2019 MacBook Pro, and the window appears 600ms
| after clicking on the dock icon. I would not call that
| immediate, and it only gets worse when you try more complex
| applications, especially those written in Electron.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Code comes from the same shop that writes Windows. However, I
| would compare that with older software of similar purpose and
| capability. How long does it take to launch Visual Studio
| '97? According to some youtube screen recordings, VS '97
| needs over a minute to draw a window even with a hot file
| cache, which is consistent with my memory.
| crazygringo wrote:
| On my M1 MBA, I just tried measuring opening Calculator using
| QuickTime screen recording, and then the "trim" function to
| determine 10 ms precision. It takes 260 ms. Definitely fast
| enough for me.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| VSCode is ~1s.
|
| Terminal ~300ms.
|
| iTerm ~400ms.
|
| Calculator ~300ms.
|
| Firefox ~1s.
|
| Textedit ~200ms.
|
| Slack ~1s to appear, ~5s to load.
|
| Sequel Ace ~800ms.
|
| Fork ~500ms.
|
| All my subjective experience, but it's basically instant in
| experience. I think it also helps that it doesn't show fade
| in/out animations, which LOOK sluggish to me.
|
| M1 MacBook Pro from 2020...
| me551ah wrote:
| Electron is probably the biggest culprit. There are still a few
| native apps that I use like mIRC, foobar2000 and they always feel
| very snappy.
| garganzol wrote:
| Electron feels snappy on modern machines as well. If only it
| took a bit less RAM than it currently takes to run an app.
|
| I read somewhere that Webkit and specifically Chrome are
| optimized towards more efficient CPU usage in the expense of a
| larger RAM use. Probably makes sense in terms of energy
| consumption but you need more RAM.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Running notepad is easy. I still shiver remembering running
| Visual Age for Java as my IDE with Windows 2000. it felt like
| molasses.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Apps got a lot larger?
|
| Also they added desktop compositing animations.
|
| Opening a command prompt or mspaint is not exactly demanding and
| opens instantly on modern computers too when all desktop
| compositing animations are turned off.
| agilob wrote:
| >Apps got a lot larger?
|
| This guy is also comparing old HDD to SSD, RAM speed is also
| magnitudes faster
| casey2 wrote:
| Instantly? Are we watching the same video? Have you not used
| any version of Windows past 2000? It took well over a second
| for explorer to open (and even longer to load) on the modern
| laptop; It even took over a second for the terminal to load.
| Having native programs open in under a frame on modern hardware
| would be trivial just ask the kernel team to write the
| application software.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I literally just tested it on my Win10 PC and it's instant (I
| have all compositing animations turned off).
| wordsarelies wrote:
| My old Windows 98SE box on a 200Mhz MMX processor was perfect
| responsiveness.
|
| We say that today, and remember the best part of the
| experience... but we do forget, it was all at the mercy of your
| (maybe if you're lucky) UltraATA/33mhz bus.
| Joeri wrote:
| 600 mhz is quite the machine for NT. I remember running NT4 on a
| 233 mhz pentium II with 128 MB RAM and everything felt instant
| and limitless.
|
| Windows 2000 was quite the hog compared to NT4 and all it added
| that I had a use for was USB support. I think by that point Dave
| Cutler was no longer running the show and windows performance
| slowly started degrading.
| jaclaz wrote:
| I remember a HP machine (@600Mhz) which my company bought circa
| 2001 that came with an install CD that had both NT 4.00 and
| Windows 2000 and the user could decide to install the one or
| the other, a few machines had initially NT 4.00 due to some
| accounting software that did not run (for _whatever_ reasons)
| on Windows 2000, while some had 2K installed.
|
| Of course the NT 4.0 was a bit faster, but not that much with
| "common" programs (Office and similar).
|
| The occupation on disk of the OS was however 3x (NT 4.00 was
| around 180 MB, 2K around 650 MB).
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, the most important factor isn't so much the CPU, but
| loading binaries from disk. And that (I/O) improved quite
| massively over the 1990s. (And anything written for spinning
| disks will start nearly instantly using solid state storage.)
|
| To illustrate the CPU/disk-access ratio: There's a reason for
| scripting languages becoming prevalent for web backends in the
| 1990s. Loading a script source from disk and precompiling it on
| the fly was still faster than loading a much bigger binary from
| disk - which had to be done on each CGI request. (E.g., with
| Perl, you could have your normal script, but you could also
| produce an executable binary from a core. But nobody did the
| latter for the exact reason.)
| tapoxi wrote:
| He shows Win 2000 later in that thread, still snappy.
| jmmv wrote:
| Hey folks, author of the Twitter thread here.
|
| It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5
| minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not
| expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second
| thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there
| (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter
| really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are
| now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.)
|
| I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because
| they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in
| many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks
| are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to
| surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual
| machines have also allowed for new types of development and
| deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs
| do enable things we _couldn 't_ do, like on-the-fly video
| transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics
| animations for free. And the list goes on.
|
| BUT. That still doesn't mean _everything_ is better. UIs have
| generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even
| in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had
| at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I
| still notice it on the Mac Pro I 'm running Windows 11 on (my
| primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast
| multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to approach, but not reach, the
| responsiveness we used to have in native desktop apps before. And
| this is really my pet peeve and what prompted the tweets.
|
| Other random thoughts:
|
| * Some massive wins we got in the past, like the switch from HDDs
| to SSDs, have been eaten away and now SSDs are a requirement.
|
| * Lag is less visible on macOS and Linux desktops as they still
| feature mostly-native apps (unscientific claim as well).
|
| * The Surface Go 2 isn't a very performant machine indeed, but
| note it _ships_ with Windows 11 and the lag exists out of the
| box, so that makes it enough to qualify as a fair comparison. The
| specs I quoted were wrong though because I misread them from
| whichever website returned them to me. I don 't care though
| because this is the experience I get on all reasonably-modern
| machines.
|
| * Yes, I had opened the apps in both computers before running the
| video, so they were all cached in memory (which puts the newer
| system in a worse light?).
|
| * One specific thing that illustrates the problem is Notepad: the
| app was recently "rewritten" (can't recall exactly what the
| changes were). It used to open instantaneously on the Go 2, but
| not any more.
|
| * NT 3.51 wasn't truly fair game because it was years-older than
| the machine. But if you scroll down the thread you'll see the
| same "test" rerun on Windows 2000 (released same year as the
| hardware).
|
| I might come back to extend the list of random thoughts. A proper
| follow-up blog post would be nice, but I'm not going to have time
| to write one right away.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| No one could seriously disagree with your findings. Your modern
| windows box is probably phoning home before opening each app,
| among other insane behaviors.
|
| Windows 2000 (Server) was the best windows operating system
| ever made by far.
| vmpost wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the write-up. I've been losing my patience with
| Windows for a long time, and seeing "AI" in an add on my _start
| menu_ made me see red. I downloaded Linux Mint on my laptop for
| the first time and have been tinkering around with it for the
| past few days - it 's definitely got a learning curve, but I
| really appreciate how flexible it feels versus Windows. I'm one
| of those people who have to go into Powershell with any new
| Windows device right off the bat, so I can remove most of the
| apps I don't need - an Xbox game interface, really? - but even
| I can remember a time when it wasn't _this_ bad. I 'm not even
| that old: the earliest Windows system I have concrete memories
| of is Windows XP!
| waboremo wrote:
| We just rely on layers and layers of cruft. We then demand
| improvements when things get too bad, but we're only operating on
| the very top layer where even dramatic improvements and magic are
| irrelevant.
|
| Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance,
| which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not
| to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem,
| Catalyst) but it's not as overt.
|
| A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an
| Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even
| native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing
| a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great
| example of this.
|
| Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space
| to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in
| direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!
| wongarsu wrote:
| > Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy
| reliance
|
| Part of the "problem" with Windows is also lack of legacy
| reliance. As in: MacOS and Linux are at heart Unix systems,
| with a kernel architecture meant for 1970s hardware. The
| Windows NT kernel family is a clean-sheet design from the
| 1990s, a time where compute resources were much more plentiful.
|
| For example, on Linux file system access has (by default) very
| basic permissions, and uses a closely coupled file system
| driver and memory system in the kernel. On Windows there is a
| very rich permission system, and ever request goes through a
| whole stack of Filesystem Filter Drivers and other indirections
| that can log, verify or change them. This is great from a
| functionality standpoint: virus scanners get a chance to scan
| files as you open them and deny you access if they find
| something, logging or transparent encryption is trivial to
| implement, tools like DropBox have an easy time downloading a
| file as you access it without dealing with implementing a whole
| file system, the complex permission system suits enterprise
| needs, etc. But on the other hand all these steps make the
| system a lot slower than the lean Linux implementation. And
| similar resource-intensive things are happening all over the
| kernel-API in Windows, simply because those APIs were conceived
| at a time when these tradeoffs had become acceptable.
| c00lio wrote:
| > On Windows there is a very rich permission system, and ever
| request goes through a whole stack of Filesystem Filter
| Drivers and other indirections that can log, verify or change
| them. This is great from a functionality standpoint: virus
| scanners get a chance to scan files as you open them and deny
| you access if they find something,
|
| Yes, but still it seems to be useless to implementers,
| because practically every virus scanner implements braindead
| stuff like DLL injection for on-access-scanning.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > The Windowsw NT kernel family is a clean-sheet design from
| the 1990s
|
| I thought that the NT Kernel was heavily based on VMS. When
| Dave Cutler, their chief OS architect/guru left for Microsoft
| and took a bunch of engineers with him. FTA:
|
| "Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28,
| 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the
| similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their
| observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital
| cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital
| announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required
| Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote
| NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server
| networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for
| the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65
| million and 100 million dollars."
|
| [0] https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-
| vms...
| blincoln wrote:
| > A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an
| Electron app
|
| I think this blame is fair. Electron is the most obvious
| example, but in general desktop software that essentially
| embeds a full browser instance because it makes development
| slightly easier is the culprit in almost every case I've
| experienced.
|
| I use a Windows 10 laptop for work.[1] The app that has the
| most lag and worst performance impact for as long as I've used
| the laptop is Microsoft Teams. Historically, chat/conferencing
| apps would be pretty lightweight, but Teams is an Electron app,
| so it spawns eight processes, over 200 threads, and consumes
| about 1GB of memory while idle.
|
| Slack is a similar situation. Six processes, over 100 threads,
| ~750MB RAM while idle. For a chat app!
|
| Microsoft recently added embedded Edge browser controls into
| the entire Office 365 suite (basically embraced-and-extended
| Electron), and sure enough, Office is now super laggy too. For
| example, accepting changes in a Word doc with change tracking
| enabled now takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds per change, where
| it was almost instantaneous before. Eight msedgewebview2.exe
| processes, ~150 threads, but at least it's only consuming about
| 250MB of RAM.
|
| Meanwhile, I can run native code, .NET, Java, etc. with
| reasonable performance as long as the Electron apps aren't also
| running. I can run multiple Linux VMs simultaneously on this
| laptop with good response times, or I can run 1-2 Electron
| apps. It's pretty silly.
|
| [1] Core i5, 16GB RAM, SSD storage. Not top of the line, but
| typical issue for a business environment.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Create a cross-platform UI toolkit that is easy to use, has
| all the accessibility features of the browser built in, and
| has a UI control toolkit as rich as say mui.com ... Support
| SVG as well as stylized layout similar to html+css.
|
| It's not an easy task, and it's not something that anyone has
| really done. There are plenty of single platform examples,
| and Flutter is about as close as you can get in terms of
| cross platform.
|
| There are also alternatives that can use the engine of an
| installed OS browser. Tauri is a decent example for Rust.
| Also, Electron isn't to blame for the issues with Teams. VS
| Code pretty much proves you can create a relatively
| responsive application in a browser interface.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| We need linux to add electron or an equivalent directly to
| the OS. Cut out the browser and the bullshit. Allow meme
| developers to write in meme languages but still get good
| performance.
| qball wrote:
| >We need linux to add electron or an equivalent directly
| to the OS.
|
| Almost like some kind of... web OS?
|
| To think we _almost_ had it, but Palm made some bad
| decisions back in 2009 and the dream of app-as-browser +
| Node.JS + consistent application styling and syscalls
| through a provided JS framework (Enyo) is, sadly,
| probably dead forever.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's been done many times. HTML/DOM is a very primitive UI
| toolkit by any measure, even with extensions like mui.com
| beating it is not all that difficult. Are a few open source
| hackers going to manage - no. Can other companies manage
| it, yes. Especially accessibility really isn't as hard as
| people sometimes make out on this forum, and HTML isn't
| that good at it (because it lacks a lot of semantic
| information by default).
|
| Consider the feature set of JavaFX when used in combination
| with the AtlantaFX theme/widget pack. It isn't well known,
| but is maintained and has an active open source community
| today.
|
| - All the same controls as mui.com shows and more advanced
| ones too, like a rich text editor, a way more advanced
| table view, tree views, table tree views, etc.
|
| - Media and video support.
|
| - 3D scene graph support. HTML doesn't have this! If you
| want to toss some 3D meshes into your UI you have to dive
| into OpenGL programming.
|
| - When using FXML, semantic markup (<TabView> etc)
|
| - Straightforward layout management.
|
| - A dialect of CSS2.something for styling, a TextFlow
| widget for styling and flowing rich text.
|
| - Fully reactive properties and collections, Svelte style
| (or moreso).
|
| - Icon fonts and SVG works.
|
| - Sophisticated animations and timelines API.
|
| And so on. It's also cross platform on desktop and mobile,
| and can run in a web browser (see https://jpro.one where
| the entire website is a javafx app), and can be accessed
| from many different languages.
|
| Flutter is actually not quite as featureful in comparison,
| for example there's no WebView control or multi-window
| support on desktop, though Flutter has other advantages
| like the hot reload feature, better supported mobile story.
| The community is lovely too.
|
| Then you have AppKit, which is also very feature rich.
|
| So it's definitely a task that people have done. Many of
| these toolkits have features HTML doesn't even try to have.
| The main thing they lack is that, well, they aren't the
| web. People often find out about apps using hypertext and
| being able to have a single space for documents and apps is
| convenient. When you're not heavily reliant on low friction
| discovery though, or have alternatives like the app stores,
| then web-beating UI toolkits aren't that big of a lift in
| comparison.
|
| _> Electron isn 't to blame for the issues with Teams. VS
| Code pretty much proves you can create a relatively
| responsive application in a browser interface_
|
| Electron is great, but most apps aren't VS Code. On my 2019
| Intel MacBook Terminal.app starts in <1 second and WhatsApp
| starts in about 7 seconds. Electron is Chrome and Chrome's
| architecture is very specifically designed for being a web
| browser. The multi-process aspect of Chrome is for example
| not a huge help for Electron where the whole app is trusted
| anyway, though because HTML is so easy to write insecurely,
| sandboxing that part of it can still be helpful even with
| apps that don't display untrusted data. That yields a lot
| of overhead especially on Windows where processes are
| expensive.
| tracker1 wrote:
| The jpro.one website looks like it's rendering in the
| browser to me, are you sure the "standalone" and "cross-
| platform" options aren't also using a browser render
| surface?
|
| I also said, "Flutter is about as close as you can get"
| regarding coming close to what I was referring to.
|
| AppKit is _NOT_ cross-platform. Beyond this, you have
| other means of embedding a browser-ui application without
| all of chrome included, see Tauri as one example.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| JPro runs the app server side, but the UI is rendered to
| a stream of commands that are then interpreted by the
| client in the browser to draw using divs, SVG and browser
| text. The result is that scrolling, text rendering, fills
| etc are done by the browser but all the actual app logic
| is server side. However event handling is all server
| side. If you run the same app on the desktop then it uses
| its own rendering stack.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > Especially accessibility really isn't as hard as people
| sometimes make out on this forum
|
| Just to make sure I'm not being one of those people: What
| AccessKit [1] has now, across Windows, macOS, and Linux,
| took roughly six person-months of work. We still need to
| support more widget types, especially list views, tables
| (closely related), and tree views, but we do already have
| text editing covered on Windows and macOS. Perhaps it
| helps that I'm an accessibility expert, especially on
| Windows. Anecdotally, it seems that implementing UIA from
| scratch is daunting for non-experts. But I guess in the
| big picture it's really not that hard.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _it 's not something that anyone has really done_
|
| It has been done many times.
|
| Not only that, if you want to use a web page for a GUI,
| then do it by making a local web server back end and just
| use the web browser.
|
| This idea that electron is somehow the only way to get
| cross platform GUIs is some sort of bizarre twilight zone
| where a bunch of people who only know javascript ignore
| that last three decades of software.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Okay, care to name some of these many cross-platform,
| easy to use UI toolkits that include the accessibility
| that the browser has?
|
| Also, I never said Electron was the only way... I
| specifically mentioned Tauri in my comment as an example
| of a browser renderer. And it doesn't need to use a local
| web server either.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Qt, FLTK, WxWidgets
|
| _And it doesn 't need to use a local web server either._
|
| Shipping an entire browser so someone can pop up a single
| window is not a positive. Again, if you want html as your
| interface, use html and let people use their own browser
| so that the entire program is 400KB instead of 400 MB
| tracker1 wrote:
| Qt, open-source only or expensive licensing. C++ only
| bindings... wouldn't call it "easy to use"
|
| FLTK, no accessibility features
|
| WxWidgets, really limited theming, not even close to
| html+css. Cross platform compatibility is hit and miss,
| usually requiring a lot of one-off platform corrections.
|
| Also, as I said, you don't need to ship the entire
| browser... not once, but twice... try reading slower.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _Qt, open-source only or expensive licensing_
|
| It's LGPL, lots of programs use it like qTorrent, VLC and
| much more. You can make up criticisms but it has been a
| backbone of GUIs for decades.
|
| _FLTK, no accessibility features_
|
| What exactly do you need and do you need it for every GUI
| you make? If you want a web page, use a web page.
|
| _WxWidgets, really limited theming,_
|
| Suddenly theming is your deal breaker.
|
| _not even close to html+css_
|
| Thankfully, because that is often not a good way to make
| a GUI.
|
| _as I said, you don 't need to ship the entire
| browser..._
|
| No, you said "it doesn't need to use a local web server
| either." Also 'entire web browser or not' electron
| programs end up being hundreds of megabytes for a simple
| window use hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
|
| The bottom line here is not that electron is necessary.
| It is that you want to use javascript even though your
| users will hate it.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > What exactly do you need and do you need it for every
| GUI you make?
|
| A GUI toolkit that has no support for screen readers, or
| other assistive technologies that require accessibility
| APIs, should be a non-starter for most applications IMO.
| We need more options that meet that criterion without
| going all the way to a web page.
| Narishma wrote:
| Qt has been LGPL for ages. You can use it for free just
| fine in proprietary apps, as long as you don't modify Qt
| itself.
| refulgentis wrote:
| [flagged]
| dmonitor wrote:
| Don't blame Electron for Teams. It certainly doesn't help,
| but there's plenty of Electron apps that are perfectly
| functional and fairly snappy. Just compare it with VS Code.
| Same company, both Electron apps. The difference is
| astonishing.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > because it makes development slightly easier
|
| That "slightly" is doing a massive amount of heavy lifting in
| that sentence.
|
| I run a company on the side that produces software for events
| which require a website and mobile apps for iOS (iPhone and
| iPad)/Android. I cannot imagine being able to do this all on
| my own without being able to share a codebase (mobile apps
| built via Capacitor) across all of them. Would native apps be
| faster? Almost certainly but I'm not going to learn Kotlin
| and Swift and triple the number of codebases I have to work
| it. It's completely infeasible for me, maybe some of you are
| able to do that but I'm not, there aren't enough hours in the
| day.
|
| I fully understand the cruft/baggage that methods like this
| bring but I also see first-hand what they allow a single
| developer to build on their own. I'll take that trade. I'm a
| little less forgiving of large companies but Discord and
| Slack (and other Electron apps) work fine for me, I don't see
| the issues people complain about.
| tom_ wrote:
| Teams has at least 2, maybe even 3 people working on it.
| mysterydip wrote:
| > work fine for me, I don't see the issues people complain
| about.
|
| What are the specs on the machine you're using?
| kaba0 wrote:
| While you are definitely right to a degree, let's also not
| forget that depending on how far we go back, everything was
| English, ascii-only with no accessibility and security.
|
| By requiring more than that, we had to increase the _essential_
| complexity. I believe this tradeoff in itself is well worth it
| (and hopefully we can all agree on that going back to us-ascii-
| only locale is not a forward direction).
|
| The problem I see is that the layers you also mention, each
| expose leaky abstractions (note that abstractions are _not_ the
| problem, no person on Earth could implement anything remotely
| useful without abstractions -- that's our only tool to fight
| against complexity, of which a significant amount is
| _essential_ , that is not reducible). Let's also add a
| "definition" I read in a HN comment on what constitutes an
| 'expert': "knowing at least 2 layers beneath the one one is
| working with" (not sure if it was 1 or 2).
|
| Given that not many people are experts and a tendency of
| cheaping out on devs, people indeed are only scratching that
| top layer (often not even understanding that single one!), but
| the problem might also be in how we organize these layers? When
| an abstraction works well it can really be a breeze and a huge
| (or only significant, see Brooks) productivity boost to just
| add a library and be done with it -- so maybe the primitives we
| use for these layers are inadequate?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about Catalyst, but at least it moves in
| lockstep with iOS advancements/deprecations and isn't holding
| macOS development back for the sake of backwards compatibility
| with some obscure thing from 20+ years ago.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Not only that. It's not Wirth's Law.
|
| It's the fact that manpower can't keep up with the exploding
| amount of complexity and use cases that happened to computing
| in the last decades.
|
| We went from CLI commands and a few graphical tools for the few
| that actually wanted to engage with computers, to an entire
| ecosystem of entertainment where everyone in the world wants
| 'puters to predict what could they want to see or buy next.
|
| To maintain the same efficiency in code we had in the 90-2000s,
| we would need to instantly jump the seniority of every
| developer in the world, right from Junior to Senior+. Yes, you
| can recruit and train developers, but how many Tanenbaums and
| Torvalds can you train per year?
|
| The biggest amount of cruft not only went to dark patterns and
| features in programs like animations and rendering that some
| people regard it as "useless" (which is debatable at minimum).
| But the layers went also to improve "developer experience".
|
| And I'm not talking about NodeJS only. I'm talking about
| languages like Python, Lua, or even the JVM.
|
| There's a whole universe of hoops and loops and safeguards made
| so that the not-so-genius developer doesn't shoot themselves in
| the foot so easily.
|
| I'm sure that you can delete all of that, only leave languages
| like Rust, C and C++ and get a 100x jump in performance. But
| you'd also be annihilating 90% of the software development
| workforce. Good luck trying to watch a movie in Netflix or
| counting calories on a smartwatch.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _everyone in the world wants 'puters to predict what could
| they want to see or buy next._
|
| This doesn't strike me like something "everyone in the world
| wants", but rather something a small group of leaches is
| pushing on the rest of the population, to enrich themselves
| at the expense of everyone else. I'm yet to meet a person
| that would tell me they actually want computers to tell them
| what to see or buy. And if I met such person, I bet they'd
| backtrack if they learned how those systems work.
|
| Exercise for the reader: name one recommendation system that
| doesn't suck. They all do, and it's not because
| recommendations are hard. Rather, it's because those systems
| aren't tuned to recommend what the users would like - they're
| optimized to recommend what maximizes vendor's revenue. This
| leads to well-known absurdities like Netflix recommendations
| being effectively random, and the whole UX being optimized to
| mask how small their catalogue is; or Spotify recommendations
| pushing podcasts whether you want them or not; or how you buy
| a thing and then get spammed for weeks by ads for the same
| thing, because as stupid as it is, it seems to maximize
| effectiveness at scale. Etc.
|
| > _I 'm sure that you can delete all of that, only leave
| languages like Rust, C and C++ and get a 100x jump in
| performance. But you'd also be annihilating 90% of the
| software development workforce. Good luck trying to watch a
| movie in Netflix or counting calories on a smartwatch._
|
| I'll say the same thing I say to people when they claim
| banning ads would annihilate 90% of the content on the
| Internet: _good. riddance._
|
| Netflix would still be there. So would smartwatches and
| calorie counting apps. We're now drowning in deluge of shitty
| software, a lot of which is actually malware in disguise;
| "annihilating 90% of the software development workforce"
| would vastly improve SNR.
| enterprise_cog wrote:
| Oh please, get over yourself. How many of those oh so smart
| 90s devs used those elite skills to write code littered with
| exploit vectors? Or full of bugs? Or, hell, even really
| performant?
|
| You are looking back with rose tinted glasses if you think
| all software was blazing fast back then. There was a reason
| putting your cursor on a progress bar to track whether it was
| moving was a thing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _There was a reason putting your cursor on a progress bar
| to track whether it was moving was a thing._
|
| The reason it's not a thing today is because those progress
| bars got replaced by spinners and "infinite progress bars".
| At least back then you had a chance to learn or guess how
| long slow operations would take. These days, users are
| considered too dumb to be exposed to such "details".
| akarlsten wrote:
| The real reason people moved to the infinite ones is that
| the determinate progress bar is almost never accurate or
| representative, hence useless.
|
| Like beyond truly "dumb" tasks like downloading a file
| it's basically a guessing game how long it will take
| anyway, right? Say you split the whole loading bar into
| percentages based on the number of subtasks, suddenly you
| end up with a progress bar stuck on 89% for 90% of the
| total loading time.
|
| Obviously you could post-hoc measure things and adjust it
| so each task was roughly "worth" as much as the time it
| took, but people rarely did that back in the day and my
| boss would get mad at me for wasting time with it today.
| Hence, spinners.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Say you split the whole loading bar into percentages
| based on the number of subtasks, suddenly you end up with
| a progress bar stuck on 89% for 90% of the total loading
| time._
|
| Sure. But now as a user, I get to see the glimpse of
| what's going out under the hood. Combined with other
| information, such as a log of installation steps (if you
| provide it), or the sounds made by the spinning rust
| drive, those old-school determinate progress bars were
| "leaking" _huge_ amount of information, giving users both
| greater confidence and ability to solve their own
| problems. In many cases, you could guess the reason why
| that scrollbar is stuck on 89% indefinitely, just by ear,
| and then fix it.
|
| Conversely, spinners and indeterminate progress bars
| _deny users agency, and disenfranchise them_. And it 's
| just one case of many, which adds up to the sad irony of
| UI/UX field - it works hard to dumb down or hide
| everything about how computers work, and justifies it by
| claiming it's too difficult for people to understand. But
| how can they understand, how can they build a good mental
| model of computing, when the software does its best to
| hide or scramble anything that would reveal how the
| machine works?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I'm afraid you're putting too much weight on language.
| Windows is largely built on C++, no? The impact of adding
| features, multiple layers of architecture, maintained by many
| people over a long time is worse. Don't underestimate the
| capacity of creating slow software in ANY language. Software
| architecture and project management are unsolved problems in
| the industry.
| anthk wrote:
| Windows uses C# a lot.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Windows is a behemoth of legacy protocols, abandoned
| projects, and software support that ranges from bleeding
| edge gaming hardware to obscure ancient machines required
| by long term support partners and investors.
|
| Devs at MS have to make everything right in an universe
| where everything else is dead or crap. And the fact that
| Windows 11 can even run without crashing daily is an
| engineering marvel.
|
| PD: Not to defend MS, but I'm sure their current devs are
| very capable and doing their best.
| qball wrote:
| >Windows is largely built on C++, no?
|
| Microsoft has been trying to migrate Windows development to
| a managed language _for over 20 years_ ; their first
| attempt at this was a complete disaster and NT 6.0 (Vista)
| would ultimately be developed the old way.
|
| It's only really been in the last 5-7 years, with Windows
| 10 and 11, that MS has managed to get their wish as far as
| UI elements go, which is why the taskbar doesn't react
| immediately when you click on it any more and has weird
| bugs that it didn't have before.
| apetresc wrote:
| Sorry but Windows Terminal is a _terrible_ example of this. It
| does way, _way_ more than cmd.exe.
| kaba0 wrote:
| They might be referencing the "controversy" around it, where
| a prominent developer claimed and later proved that the
| terminal's render speed is simply orders of magnitude slower
| than it could be.
|
| It later turned out to be due to some Unicode handling in-
| built into a windows api they were using, while the
| developer's version also not completely feature-complete. But
| both sides were sort of right.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| [dead]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I have been saying this for a decade. Technology is getting worse
| as a whole. _Hardware_ is continuing to improve, but the
| _software_ is getting worse at a faster rate, making the overall
| product suck more.
|
| One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As
| long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage,
| software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space,
| just because a gas always fills its container.
|
| But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know
| what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped
| into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to
| use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very
| specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then
| they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how
| to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing
| code, and getting in the way of building the product, who
| shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the
| senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I
| weep.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The newest generations of children can barely read and write
| let alone use a computer.
|
| It's going to be fascinating watching what happens when there's
| nobody left capable of updating things like linux. It will be
| like a black box, people can maybe scrape together an electron
| app but they don't go any deeper.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what did you do to work with (or around) said
| people? I guess your penultimate sentence implies you moved on.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I resign myself to let things be terrible. Leadership won't
| care to fix it until it becomes a problem for them, and that
| won't happen if I'm running around trying to plug the holes
| in the dyke. Since it's a big paycheck I stay and mentally
| check out, casually searching for something better.
| guestbest wrote:
| Applications and operating systems can be a lot faster when there
| is no layered security and everything runs with admin privileges.
| roody15 wrote:
| Same with MacOS 10.6.x
|
| Snow leopard with a intel dual core 4 gigs of ram and a SSD
| performs as well as a MacBook 2019 i7 running 11.x Monterrey.
|
| So much unnecessary processes in the background IMO
|
| Keep it simple stupid whenever possible
| garganzol wrote:
| It's cheaper to beef up the hardware than to fine-tune the
| software. Fine-tuning may be excruciating because it hinders all
| other activities related to the software development.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm gonna guess here that the biggest chunk is the antivirus.
| Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the
| first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer.
|
| Another big chunk of this likely happened when they hardened the
| graphics subsystem for security. Win32 user calls are
| unbelievably expensive nowadays. SendMessage etc. have a ton of
| overhead.
|
| Another chunk is likely the sheer number of expensive DLLs that
| need to be loaded and initialized with most apps. For example,
| IIRC, the moment you load COM or WinSock DLLs, your app stops
| loading snappily. Pretty much anything will load COM even without
| intending to.
|
| Another chunk is IMM - the ctfmon process you love, for multi-
| language/keyboard support. ImmDisable(0) can make loading a bit
| snappier, but then good luck with keyboard switching and the
| like. It uses window hooks, which are slow Win32 calls as
| mentioned.
|
| People think it's just a matter of writing plain Win32, but
| that's not the whole story, although it certainly helps compared
| to more heavyweight frameworks.
| nullindividual wrote:
| You don't need to turn off Windows Defender, you need to
| disable the file system filters entirely.
|
| You can do that with Dev Drive [0][1] which is currently on the
| Win 11 dev branch.
|
| You can't do this for your boot volume, but you can do it for a
| [dynamically expanding] VHDX, secondary partition, or secondary
| volume. It will use ReFS (oddly enough, with 4 KiB clusters by
| default -- though it makes sense for the target scenario,
| unlike past uses of ReFS).
|
| [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
|
| [1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/06/01/dev-
| dr...
| dataflow wrote:
| > You don't need to turn off Windows Defender, you need to
| disable the file system filters entirely.
|
| > You can't do this for your boot volume
|
| How would this help with firing up all the built-in OS apps
| (Explorer, Notepad, etc.) being tested in the video?
| nullindividual wrote:
| It certainly wouldn't (though I don't experience the same
| issue, so not sure what to say to the video). Presumably
| your heavier apps would be installed to the Dev Drive.
| Narishma wrote:
| > Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the
| first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer.
|
| It's extremely hard to do that in recent versions of Windows.
| The most I managed to do the last time I tried was to disable
| it temporarily but it always comes back after a while.
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| dataflow wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately you need to do it with group policy.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| As far as I can tell they've removed the ability to turn
| off real-time scanning with group policy, so you have to
| disable the entire thing and not get on-demand or scheduled
| or download scans.
| eppsilon wrote:
| Defender will disable itself if it detects another AV
| product is installed...maybe someone should make one that
| acts as a no-op AV scanner.
| jandrese wrote:
| A couple of years ago I was doing a mass copy of files from
| one SSD to another. It was a few hundred GB, not terribly big
| on modern machines but it did have a large number of tiny
| files. Windows was doing the copy but it was estimating that
| the whole thing would need 8 hours to complete, and the
| estimate was pretty solid after 20 minutes. I cancelled the
| copy to investigate and tried turning off Windows Defender
| (but only temporarily as you said) and restarted the copy. It
| finished in 35 minutes. Probably would have been even faster
| if I didn't have one of the drives hooked to an old USB->SATA
| adapter.
|
| This is also why your browser will stall out when it finishes
| downloading a large file. Windows Defender kicks in an does a
| full scan before returning from the close call.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| The AV stuff is huge. It's always why windows Windows 8 era PCs
| were maybe the most brutally slow.
|
| SSDs mitigate those issues but it is so painful to run things
| on mechanical drives, a lot of which is down to the antivirus
| processes. The practical realities have changed.
|
| (Also things being snappy and fast I don't think is a common
| memory of people when the machines the author is writing about
| were contemporary. The world of software is much bigger than
| notepad and cmd.exe)
| bamfly wrote:
| > The AV stuff is huge. It's always why windows Windows 8 era
| PCs were maybe the most brutally slow.
|
| IIRC Win8's also the first Windows I found unusable on
| spinning rust. Part of it may have been AV, but things like
| opening the start menu had significantly worse delays there
| than on a flash disk. It seems like they'd simply disregarded
| all development/design discipline about disk I/O, across the
| OS.
|
| ... which, you keep doing that everywhere, lots of devs
| making lazy choices to just grab this from disk here or just
| write a little data synchronously there, and it'll add up to
| non-negligible delay, even on a flash disk. And it'll make an
| HDD craaaawl. Which is exactly what happened.
| reportgunner wrote:
| Telemetry happened.
| HackOfAllTrades wrote:
| Nope. You can turn telemetry off and not see any improvement.
| Simple reason: your app isn't waiting for telemetry to be sent.
| eimrine wrote:
| You can not really turn telemetry off, maybe your apps just
| keep working against you, collecting the info to send after
| the next system update which use to enable all "disabled"
| telemetry features.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If anything, doesn't this demonstrate that Windows lacks a
| sufficient amount of telemetry? If it was sending home stats
| about how long it takes to draw these windows, and profiles of
| what the program was doing, then they could target those and
| make it faster.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| I see you're operating under the assumption that the purpose
| of telemetry is to improve the user experience. I'm not sure
| that is even a business goal inside Microsoft.
|
| I think due to perverse incentives it causes the exact
| opposite to happen. Why did the Windows calculator need to be
| remade with a much slower and less responsive version?
| Telemetry probably showed the calculator was frequently used,
| so a Project Manager targeted it for "improvement" and it was
| then ruined.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know since I never use the Windows Calculator but
| it seems probable to me that the newer version has
| improvements that you don't need and therefore do not
| perceive. Perhaps it is more accessible to the blind, or
| the support for Urdu numerals is new. A lot of the reasons
| why old versions of Windows ran apps instantly is that they
| excluded the entire non-European world and did not even
| attempt to deal with complex languages.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| >A lot of the reasons why old versions of Windows ran
| apps instantly is that they excluded the entire non-
| European world and did not even attempt to deal with
| complex languages.
|
| There was Windows 3.2 in 1994 (not to be confused with
| "Win32", despite the name of the HTML file):
| http://toastytech.com/guis/win32.html
|
| Yes the western versions of Windows at the time didn't
| include support for Chinese (etc.) language. But there is
| really no reason why they should - if the user's language
| can be represented in an 8 bit codepage, why should they
| have to pay any price in performance for something they
| will never use?
|
| Conversely, would a Chinese-speaking user prefer an
| operating system designed to support _all the other
| languages_ that exist, with an implementation that is
| likely not as specifically tailored to their
| requirements?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| What happened? Apps got huge. OSes got huge. More and more
| security checks are needed now that every computer is connected
| 24/7.
|
| But yeah responsiveness does not seem to be a design goal anymore
| these days.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Have we tried running the old Windows NT apps on the new Windows
| system?
| kgbcia wrote:
| We all know what happened as programmers. there's layers and
| layers of abstraction.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I would never use Windows again for my own computer. It loads
| shit like candy crush in the background and keeps it in memory
| 24/7. You cannot disable that. Candy crush... I don't know how
| people work at microsoft unironically.
|
| Compare that to Mint which looks exactly the same as Windows and
| now runs 100% of Windows games and it's just unfair. It's like
| running candy crush in a barrel.
| roomey wrote:
| This is hard to understand, windows is slow, and you are
| complaining that windows is what, slower than it used to be?
|
| Why not use something faster? I get no lag with xfce
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that the Windows NT family went downhill after
| Microsoft moved Dave Cutler from running Windows NT development
| to running other projects (Windows x64, XBox, Azure).
|
| Dave's no excuses attitude towards performance and stability is
| sorely missed.
|
| I know people who ran Windows Server 2003 as a client OS, which
| was the last version of NT that Dave was in charge of.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I ran windows server 2016/2019 as a development workstation for
| a couple of years. It was great compared to windows 10. If
| docker hadn't dropped support for desktop on windows server I
| might still be running it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I ran Server 2003 on a Thinkpad T20 as a daily driver. It was a
| joy to use-- all of the XP kernel enhancements w/o any of the
| bloat.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| If I could, I would use NT 3.51 as my daily driver today. I
| know a lot of 32 bit software would still work on it well into
| the late 90s/early 2000s.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The pre-Windows 2000 NT OS's all suffer from needing too many
| reboots and the whole "re-apply the latest service pack after
| adding optional components" lunacy.
|
| I'm partial to the Windows 95-style interface so I jumped
| ship on NT 3.51 as soon as I could for NT 4.0.
|
| Jumping to Windows 2000 was, likewise, an easy decision if
| only for not having to reboot after making IP address
| changes, and having USB and plug 'n play support.
|
| Moving frm Windows 2000 to XP was less of a "no brainer". I
| continued to use Windows 2000 for quite awhile after XP came
| out. I skipped Vista entirely but Windows 7 was too nice not
| to jump on immediately. (It was the first MSFT OS I ran as a
| daily driver in beta, actually.)
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| New software is written cheap. I know what you think, when you
| hear it, but it's much cheaper to create some functionalities
| that backdays. We have c# in Windows and Java on servers. This is
| an abstraction layer which makes things working very slow. We
| have JavaScript applications each running in it's own Electron
| sandbox. This is huge help and huge cost of performance. And it's
| a huge help for developer. Entry level is much lower, one does
| not need winapi anymore (at least in most cases), animations,
| rendering, typesafety for free, no coredumps, no segfaults, no
| guru meditation. It's different world now. And a single hello
| world application weights 200MB...
|
| And another thing: security. Security on old Windows was poor.
| There are many things that need to be taken care of, but they
| used to not exist or were simply unsafe. This is another thing,
| one need to keep in mind, if one wants to just install windows 7
| or XP and play games (as I did)
| kaba0 wrote:
| Why would C# or Java make things "very slow"? The code ends up
| running as well-optimized machine code for the majority of its
| lifetime.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Ends up is the keyword here. Virtual machine takes time to
| start and warm up. There is an indirection layer between CPU
| commands and c# bytecode. Of course programmers stronger than
| me and you (maybe not you? But me for sure) are working
| constantly on how to improve this, how to make just in time
| translations etc. But These things take time. Native is
| faster on startup. Later java/c# wins unless the native code
| is done by a very skillful programmer. we're speaking on app
| startup time, right?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| And another thing: security. Security on old Windows was poor.
| There are many things that need to be taken care of, but they
| used to not exist or were simply unsafe. This is another thing,
| one need to keep in mind, if one wants to just install windows
| 7 or XP and play games (as I did)
| bityard wrote:
| For contrast, my daily driver is Debian/KDE on a typical 9-year-
| old laptop and opening/interacting with absolutely everything is
| immediate and snappy.
| Narishma wrote:
| Yes, in my experience Linux (at least KDE and xfce) is better
| at being responsive than recent Windows versions on low end
| machines.
| II2II wrote:
| They're loading the toy applications that came with Windows 3.51
| an operating system developed when 486's were common and first
| generation Pentiums were the bleeding edge, so around 100 MHz.
| (Also, using clock speed alone discounts any generational bumps
| in efficiency.) Of course it will be fast.
| mrkeen wrote:
| The same apps were opened on his modern machine for comparison.
| Are windows explorer, notepad and command prompt toy apps?
| dtx1 wrote:
| > Are windows explorer, notepad and command prompt toy apps?
|
| Yes.
| II2II wrote:
| Please don't take my excuses the wrong way, since I wish the
| performance in software reflected the increased performance
| of hardware, but we are comparing the performance of an
| operating system released five years prior to the CPU it is
| being run on to the performance of an operating system
| contemporary to the CPU. A couple of other things to note:
| the comparison uses a bleeding edge Intel processor for
| Windows NT and, to try to be polite about it, a processor
| optimized for energy efficiency for Windows 11. (If the tests
| depended upon CPU performance alone, the benchmarks for
| processor in the Surface Go 2 are comparable to my 11 year
| old i5 3330. That i5 wasn't even a high end processor at the
| time.) The second thing to consider is that performance gains
| were much more dramatic back then, so even if we could test
| Windows 11 on a 2026 processor, I wouldn't expect such
| dramatic results.
| a2tech wrote:
| Windows 95 running on a 133mhz computer would open Excel (I
| believe from Office 98) essentially instantly once the machine
| was up and running. Which unless you had AV running took under
| a minute.
| michaelt wrote:
| Modern OSes have the technology to make even the calculator app
| load slowly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
| calculator/+...
| pmontra wrote:
| I checked if I do have Calculator on my Debian and I found
| it. It opened instantly. However that was an issue for Ubuntu
| and was fixed in 20.04, three years ago.
|
| By the way, I do my math with bc -l from the command line.
| realo wrote:
| At the speed of light, photons travel about 1 foot per
| nanosecond.
|
| In other words, a modern 2 GHz processor would have time to
| execute at least one instruction between the time photons leave
| the screen, and the moment they reach your retina. Probably more
| than one, with multicore pipelined processors.
|
| And yet today we wait and wait and wait for Windows to open a
| simple program.
|
| Indeed... what happened?
| masswerk wrote:
| Let's assume, _10 milliseconds = 1 CPU year._ (If dogs can have
| their own years, why not CPUs, as well?) So, there you sit,
| waiting hundreds and hundreds of years...
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| I already struggle with waiting for the rube goldberg-esque
| build-deploy-to-dev loop at my current gig. Thanks for the
| additional disgust.
| masswerk wrote:
| I hear, the British Heath Robinson version (by Tommy
| Flowers) was quite fast... ;-)
| dathinab wrote:
| Good question.
|
| Linux also opens apps instantly, at least for me and if you
| ignore that some app after being opened instantly don't get
| instantly ready to work.
|
| But that isn't fault of the OS.
|
| Through some OSes used some tricks to hide this loading time.
|
| A good example is cold starting a web browser. Modern web
| browsers have to handle so much that just loading the amount of
| code they have all at once can lead to a noticeable delay. I mean
| e.g. the network code your browser runs is likely a few hounded
| to thousand times more complicated then what you put into a
| simple HTTP server. There is also the rule of thumb that the
| difference between something working in your use-case and it
| working in as many situations as possible for as many people as
| possible might look small from an external POV but in general
| comes with an explosion in complexity and code. And for browsers
| that is not just the case for networking but also rendering
| HTML+CSS, executing JS, storage handling, window handling,
| handling boundaries and security, extensions, caching, input
| handling etc.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I am currently using Windows 10 LTSC (the newest version) and
| after some basic configuration it is INSANE how responsive it is.
| It boots basically instantly and apps launch instantaneously. I
| hand the laptop to random people and they are always amazed and
| how well it works. This is on a decently fast Dell XPS laptop but
| nothing insane. All the crap has been stripped out.
|
| Seriously recommend trying it out - more responsive than any OS I
| have ever used - even a lean running Ubuntu or OSX
| anthk wrote:
| If you think that's responsive you haven't seen my XFCE setup.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I'd like to see it. I'm running XFCE now, I wouldn't call it
| slow but it's not quite as snappy as I'd like it to be.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Turn off composition (if Xfce allows you to, like KDE
| does). Then drag a window around your screen on a high
| framerate monitor and feel the difference.
| _dain_ wrote:
| just tried it, gives nasty looking black bars around the
| outside of firefox.
|
| latency is still there. e.g. pressing super has about a
| 100ms wait before the application launcher appears, same
| as with compositing on.
| edu wrote:
| Where's the sound of the HDD spinning to read the executables?
| Has he opened them before and are cached or is he using an SSD
| (would that be possible?)?
| ibobev wrote:
| This reminds me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-
| SOdj4Kkk) talk by Jonathan Blow. He compared the startup time of
| an older and newer version of Photoshop. The newer one was
| several times slower despite basically being the same program.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Because we cannot accept a certain piece of software as finished.
| It doesn't mean there aren't any updates. However, in the iOS
| store I can update some apps every week.
|
| On the other hand, I very much like the F-Droid store. There are
| so many useful and user-friendly apps. They work and stay like
| this for a long time.
|
| I suspect the underlying topic here is money. Open source apps
| don't get much funding. So the developers need to focus on the
| essentials and get them right. On the other hand, subscription-
| based apps have a steady inflow of money. For some reason, they
| need to constantly work on these and add new features with
| marginal utility. I regret having updated some iOS apps. They
| were working perfectly fine in 2018 but have added bloat and bugs
| since then.
| ankurdhama wrote:
| Windows 11 is doing all these desktop effects (transparency,
| animations, rounded corners etc) in the compositor. You can
| disable all those and it will improve things. Also the security
| related stuff that Windows 11 does is something that was not
| there in the past.
| beardog wrote:
| See also "input lag" by dan luu: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
|
| It is not the main thing going on in this twitter post, but it
| does show a way modern computers feel slower than older machines.
| notorandit wrote:
| What happened? Normal hyperbloat between os, libraries and
| network.
| deadletters wrote:
| Open the task manager n00b.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| In modern windows the task manager takes much much longer to
| open than it did 10years ago
| [deleted]
| mehh wrote:
| On my work machine it's all the 'helpful' software IT have added
| for info sec and asset management and god knows what, they just
| love to pile this crap on until the machine runs like a dog!
| dstaley wrote:
| I use WinMerge[1] a lot, and it's always impressed me how it
| immediately opens to a useable state. So it's absolutely still
| possible to write Windows software that can open instantly. I
| think the biggest issue, which multiple other comments have
| identified, is that people just don't care. Apps open fast enough
| these days, and no one is pushing back on developers to improve
| their app's startup performance.
|
| [1]: https://winmerge.org
| calibas wrote:
| I recently watched a junior dev casually add this hideously
| bloated and slow library so he could save an hour or so of
| programming. Part of his reasoning was that "everybody else does
| it that way".
|
| And that's why modern hardware keeps getting faster while modern
| software stays the same speed (or slower).
| AlawamiAZ wrote:
| Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
| metalforever wrote:
| I agree with the post. My first computer had worse specs than
| this and was a perfectly usable experience. I actually used it to
| edit videos. It had 128mb RAM and shipped with Windows 98.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Some additional things to note:
|
| Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486
| processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation
| version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the
| minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x
| in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going
| from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine.
|
| If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it
| doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go
| 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores
| and of those is an ultra-low power variant.
|
| As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for
| Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement.
|
| I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not
| an entirely like-for-like comparison.
| vel0city wrote:
| I imagine they're also not using vintage hard drives. Its
| pretty common in the retro computer world to use things like CF
| and SD cards for storage emulation. Even a basic CF card is
| miles faster than a 1990's HDD. Put in a period-accurate
| storage device and see how bog slow it gets.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You might try reading the second line of the Tweet before
| criticising its author.
| vel0city wrote:
| The text content of the tweets seem pretty unreliable as
| this states its a Surface Go 2 with a Quad Core i5, despite
| the fact the Surface Go 2 never shipped with anything quad
| core and definitely not an i5.
|
| Maybe it is a spinning rust disk. Even then there's a world
| of difference between a period accurate drive and a late
| model IDE drive. The last IDE drives had more drive cache
| than most desktops had RAM when NT was new.
| utopcell wrote:
| Granted, a Surface Go 2 won't win any perf competition, but
| even with infinite budget you still couldn't buy a desktop
| today that has the response times of that NT box.
| [deleted]
| Solvency wrote:
| Why is Win11 so slow and unoptimized that it needs such crazy
| hardware.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't think it's unoptimized as much as it's extremely
| bloated.
| nullindividual wrote:
| The term bloat (as it applies to software) is rooted in
| gamer-think that has no basis in reality and sends a strong
| signal of lack of understanding. It's reminiscent of the
| days of 'BlackViper' and disabling Windows Services --
| again, another gamer lack of knowledge issue.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm no gamer, and "bloat" has been a term used in the
| industry from well before "gamers" (in the sense used
| today) existed. It's been a term of art for over 30
| years.
|
| It also describes a very real thing.
|
| While there are a lot of things that everyone would agree
| counts as "bloat", there are also areas of disagreement
| in the form of "one person's bloat is another's essential
| feature".
| raggi wrote:
| Empty notepad, just started. 82,416K working set in main
| memory. 25.7MB in dedicated GPU memory. 59 threads. 2
| billion cycles spent since launch.
|
| Two threads in !OpenAdatper12 spending ~1.5M cycles per
| second. Two threads in !recalloc spending ~256K cycles
| per second.
|
| As shipped, this is no longer a single executable, it is
| a collection of 230 files, totaling 10.5MB, about half of
| which are bytewise duplicates, and another significant
| chunk have overlapping responsibilities, between the icon
| fonts and png icons.
|
| "Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions
| of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more
| memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher
| hardware requirements than the previous version, while
| making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or
| suffering from feature creep." --
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
|
| I'm not aware of any substantial new features. It uses a
| new renderer, but this does not produce a significant
| observable difference from the previous one beyond using
| more memory. It supports dark mode.
| MikusR wrote:
| Also full unicode support on high resolution screen.
| nullindividual wrote:
| New renderer, dark mode, auto save, resume on open,
| HiDPI, tabs, and I'm sure a lot of things I'm forgetting.
|
| Don't forget what Notepad.exe truly is -- a testbed for
| new technologies. It's not "just a text editor" to
| Microsoft.
| Narishma wrote:
| What's the difference?
| bunga-bunga wrote:
| /s
|
| Bloat is intentional and fills Microsoft's wallet.
|
| Optimization drains Microsoft's wallet.
| nullindividual wrote:
| A meaningless term to deride a feature or service you
| don't like or use.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Bloat" includes the addition of intentional, but
| frivolous, features. An application can be well-optimized
| but still slow simply because it's doing too much.
|
| But I think the reason that most modern software performs
| badly is because of optimization: we're optimizing to
| reduce production costs over increasing performance.
|
| It's economic in nature. We minimize production costs by
| using frameworks and other labor-saving tools. The code
| produced using these tools tends to be poor, but hardware
| is cheap enough to make up for poorly performing
| software.
|
| It's an intentional decision.
| szatkus wrote:
| Some of that bloat is useful. Windows indexes files in the
| background, which would choke a single-core machine with
| HDD for sure. Thanks to that I can quickly access my
| files... well, so long as Windows is able to find the
| correct thing...
| hulitu wrote:
| > Windows indexes files in the background, which would
| choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure.
|
| This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a
| performance hit, but it was the first thing to be
| disabled after installing windows.
| dinvlad wrote:
| The new Windows Terminal is also extremely slow for some
| wild reason
| nullindividual wrote:
| Launches into PoSh 7 x64 in <1s for me on Win 11.
| nullindividual wrote:
| > Some of that bloat is useful.
|
| If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of
| Windows is bloat by definition.
|
| You've got CLI editors that are smaller.
| vel0city wrote:
| A graphical user interface? Just bloat.
|
| Ships with a TCP/IP stack by default? Just bloat.
|
| _Mouse support_ out of the box? Who would want that?
| nullindividual wrote:
| C64 lovers would likely agree with all of those points.
| concordDance wrote:
| And yet when I want to search in the files in a folder
| searching with windows search won't turn up anything, so
| I have to switch to the WSL and grep...
| whartung wrote:
| Windows has been indexing files for over 20 years.
|
| Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search
| function that usable, and more than once I've had a
| "clean and build" process fail because some file was open
| and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read,
| the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So,
| I turned it off.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Some of that bloat is useful
|
| Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to
| someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't
| change the fact that there's a cost for including it.
|
| > Windows indexes files in the background
|
| But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I _hate_ this
| behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit
| that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless
| bloat.
|
| Everything's a tradeoff.
| Jochim wrote:
| > But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this
| behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit
| that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless
| bloat.
|
| Turn it off then?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes? That doesn't affect my point about it being a kind
| of bloat.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Expect that the search totally sucks. Have you tried
| Voidtools Everything? It finds files instantly, even on
| filesystems with millions of files. Yes, instantly, you
| type a word and it's just there, no matter SSD or HDD.
| Windows' built in search is a complete waste of time.
| tom_ wrote:
| It only searches the names.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Indexing is a weird example to use considering how
| notoriously garbage Windows file search is.
|
| For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it
| takes forever to find file names.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| I think the bloating hardware requirements are his point. What
| precisely have they gotten us? Mind you, this is _not_ the same
| as "what have we gotten in the time that they've bloated"!
| Narishma wrote:
| In the tweet right below there's a video of them running
| Windows 2000 on the same hardware and it's just as responsive.
| a2tech wrote:
| If you ran Windows NT on the bare minimum it was not as slow
| (barring hitting swap) as Windows 11 on the bare minimum
| hardware. Not even close. Windows NT on the minimum hardware
| wasn't a joy exactly but it was certainly workable. If you run
| Win11 on the bare minimum you'll very quickly learn to hate
| everything.
| philistine wrote:
| Are you sure this applies to laptops from back then? The
| minimal laptop that could run NT must have been so much worse
| than a desktop.
| bamfly wrote:
| The min specs would be the same, laptop or desktop. A
| laptop with those kind of specs back then probably just had
| terrible battery life and was really big & heavy, didn't
| throttle down or anything. Not like today when you'd expect
| the "same part" or "same clock speed" to not _really_ be
| the same, between a mobile and desktop chip.
| rsynnott wrote:
| IIRC laptops of that sort of era often used slower RAM,
| and laptop hard drives were generally _much_ slower than
| desktop ones.
|
| (Also there was a period when a lot of laptops used non-
| Intel x86 implementations, which typically weren't very
| good. Cyrix, Via et al.)
| acdha wrote:
| In 1998, I exclusively used NT 4 on a Dell Latitude to do
| software development for a month while working overseas. It
| wasn't super fast but it was comparable to a non-
| workstation desktop - in both cases you could not skimp on
| RAM but otherwise it was fine. The biggest gripe I had was
| the Synaptics touchpad, which is evergreen.
| [deleted]
| goosedragons wrote:
| They do have a better example with Windows 2000 on the Pentium
| 3 which is very era appropriate.
|
| I see similar sluggishness opening command prompt on my Ryzen
| 3700X with 64GB RAM on Windows 11 22H2 with an NVME SSD. First
| it draws the outline of the window then fills it in with
| content. And that's repeatable!
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Yup if you run a Windows VM in a M2 Max Mac or a PC with a
| Intel 13900, stuff opens pretty fast too.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I'm in university and each exam I have to install windows 10 to
| run Safe Exam Browser (same hardware), in between I use Linux
| as my daily driver. The perceived difference in responsiveness
| is always frustrating, though I find that a lot of it probably
| is just due to user hostile design. No OS that constantly nags
| about tracking me, showing me ads, and so on will feel snappy.
| I'm sure there is some real lag as well though.
|
| Microsoft has essentially turned the OS into one of those
| websites which show ads, news letter dialogs, cookie notices,
| location permission requests, notification requests and so on
| constantly.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I ran NT 3.51 on a PS/2 486-66 with either 40MB (maybe 48MB)
| RAM and a scsi disk. It was nice compiling VC++ programs on it.
|
| I now use a Surface Go3 i3 with 8GB. It's enough for just about
| everything I need. Web browser, running script language web
| apps, Java IDE, StarCraft 2. Disabling a bunch of stuff on
| Win11 makes a big difference. Whenever it felt slow I looked at
| Task Manager CPU and googled the process name, tried disabling
| it and only re-enable if necessary. Oh I also have a Peltier
| cooler+fan that cools the back of the unit when gaming to
| prevent throttling.
|
| The PS/2 NT machine was top spec at the time. The Go3 is
| utilitarian now though should be like a supercomputer.
| binary_ninja wrote:
| I feel like the intent was to say notepad from 20 years ago and
| notepad from today has (approx) the same functionality whereas
| the processors are x4 times faster, it should be at least as
| fast as it was before, shouldn't it? In my mind, regardless of
| the OS requirements, a processor x4 more powerful shouldn't
| need double the time to launch the same program unless you've
| added x4+ features.
| Aloha wrote:
| I can start notepad on my relatively slow Win10 VM with
| spinning disks in RAID and it starts with similar speeds -
| starting it on my physical windows machine with a SSD, it
| launches at exactly the same speed.
| stn8188 wrote:
| Another very similar example to this is the adding text
| feature in MS Paint. I noticed that somehow on the Windows 11
| version, it takes many seconds after clicking the "add text"
| button to be able to actually start typing. Previously, it
| was instantaneous.
| NikkiA wrote:
| Notepad back then could only edit 32kB maximum files, even on
| 32bit NT, it was literally all the text widget could handle.
|
| So no, it's not really fair to compare a 'simple' text
| editor.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Notepad on NT4 could edit files as large as you had memory.
| I never used 3.5 but I guess they must have made that
| change in NT4.
| hulitu wrote:
| 64KB.
| redundantly wrote:
| It is a fair comparison.
|
| If you edit the same 1KB file on each computer side by side
| the 30 year old computer will be more responsive than the
| modern one.
|
| That's what people are taking issue with.
| sjcoles wrote:
| Add onto that the fact the 8th and 10th gen Intel low power
| mobile parts are, well, kinda garbage (low perf/watt, very
| little boost time, low core count) and were quickly obsoleted.
|
| I'm not sure why Msft put that CPU and RAM combo in their own
| device when it's just barely past the minimum specs for Windows
| 10 let alone 11.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > not an entirely like-for-like comparison.
|
| I'm not sure why Windows minimum hardware requirements are
| relevant at all. If they were, they could get massive
| performance improvements by raising the hardware requirements.
| "Sure it's slow, but it's running on literally 1% of minimum
| recommended RAM!"
| nullindividual wrote:
| They were very relevant back in the '90s. So relevant, it's
| why Windows 9x existed. The Windows NT 4 minimum system
| requirements around RAM were too high, thus deemed too
| expensive for consumers.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| As others have pointed out, Windows 2000 would probably be a
| better comparison than NT 3.51. Apps did not open instantly on
| most computers in ~2000, and larger apps like Word could take a
| few seconds.
|
| On the other hand, a large part of the delay was due to the slow
| seek time of the magnetic hard drive (milliseconds). The CPUs
| only had one core, and RAM was both smaller and much slower.
| Modern SSDs make seek time negligible, ancient PassMark scores
| suggest a >10x improvement in single-core CPU performance, and
| there's been a >20x improvement in RAM transfer rate and a >40x
| improvement in RAM size. Residential internet bandwidth has seem
| something like a 100x improvement.
|
| None of that hardware improvement seems visible in modern PCs,
| except for nicer graphics and (especially) higher-resolution
| displays. But comparing video games from ~2000 to video games
| today reveals just how small that graphical difference is in the
| OS/application space. MS Office was a lot more responsive in the
| early 2000s, too.
|
| In the early days of Firefox, the developers bragged that every
| new release was smaller than the previous one. Maybe one day
| there will be a fad for more responsive software in general.
| anthk wrote:
| He already did.
| TehShrike wrote:
| If you scroll down a little bit, he demos Windows 2000 on the
| same machine.
| https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| With the apps shown - paint, explorer, cmd and notepad, it's
| still instant today. Web and electron stuff, on the other hand ..
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm curious what's on that system for storage. Is it using the
| original hard drive, or does he have some kind of solid state
| medium hooked up? Because I do _not_ recall things loading that
| fast.
|
| Yes, input latency back then was far better. But actually
| launching things came with appreciable pauses. Because disks back
| then _sucked_.
| Aloha wrote:
| Well of course it does.
|
| WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was
| either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz
| machine is likely a Coppermine PIII.
|
| A fairly common amount of RAM in 1995 to Run WinNT would have
| been around 32 megs of ram, 64 megs would be especially generous.
| 128 megs is a high end workstation amount of memory.
|
| The ATA interface also doubled in performance between 1995 and
| 2000.
|
| There were significant security and stability improvements
| between NT 3.51 and Windows 2000 - particularly with changes to
| the driver model that increased stability. (even more so between
| 2000 and Windows 10/11)
| madars wrote:
| That's right, Windows 95 on a 600 MHz machine would be even
| snappier. However, later down the thread the author
| demonstrates Windows 2000:
|
| >For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is
| Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same
| year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same
| and hadn't been ruined yet.
|
| https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065
| Aloha wrote:
| I tested on my own local win10 VM, and I get similar
| performance for the inbuilt windows apps.
|
| cmd, control panel, and most of the things in admin tools
| launch virtually instantly.
|
| This is for a machine that is running on relatively slow
| spinning disks too.
| grork wrote:
| As someone who was _hardcore_ into Windows around that time,
| all my memory has is waiting desperately for windows to open
| & apps to load. I remember watching the left-side of explorer
| paint before the icons came in, and how the icons would paint
| in order; some days you'd see black squares paint, then the
| icon. This was running on some dual-socket, 192mb, 7200rpm
| spinning disk - it wasn't a slouch.
|
| I also struggle with the comparison between high-end hardware
| of yesteryear, and low end hardware of today and comparing.
|
| Try running win2k in 16mb, 300mhz P2, and a 4800rpm drive.
|
| The only times I remember experiencing things this fast in my
| computing career were (a) with a fair wind, and a fully
| warmed cache that didn't hit the disk & was a trivial app (b)
| the first time I used my Apple M1 Max MBP.
| codeflo wrote:
| Then don't dodge the question and tell me the specs of the
| high-end computer that makes modern Windows that snappy.
| Because I have a fairly ridiculous machine as my main
| workstation, and I still wait way longer for stuff to load
| than I used to.
| Aloha wrote:
| Core i5 or i7, 16-32gb of RAM, a NVME SSD
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was
| either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz
| machine is likely a Coppermine PIII.
|
| This is addressed in the linked thread.
|
| >For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is
| Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same
| year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same
| and hadn't been ruined yet.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| In 1995 getting 128MB of RAM would have been quite expensive.
| In 1999 not so much. One of the easy things to do with NT or
| 98 in the 98-2000 era was to put 128MB of ram in when it
| suddenly became very affordable. It was a night and day
| experience. I had one game that ran absolutely rubbish in
| 1995 when I bought it. Years later I came across a few memory
| sticks and popped them in and gave the thing 16MB of ram from
| 8. The game started nearly instantly and ran very nicely
| (usually took 3-5 mins to start). With 8 it was choppy city
| and slow. Exact same computer only diff was the memory.
|
| If memory serves me they did not really change much in NT
| from 4.0 to 2k. Other than add in more services and make it
| more win98 like. So it is maybe not an 'unfair' comparison.
| But win 3.51 came out getting that sort of computer just
| would not be in the cards for most people.
|
| Windows went sideways at vista. The 'start the computer up'
| out of the box would use 2-3gig of ram. Up from 100-200MB
| from the XP era. Toss in some corp bloatware items. One place
| I saw it was 10gig just to open the desktop no productivity
| software even started yet. Then add in the zillions of
| indirect layers we have added to make programming easier and
| we are now with applications that seem to start at about the
| same rate as 25 years ago.
|
| All of those old API's are still there. No one really uses
| them much anymore. We use the latest cool frameworks. That
| use the previous cool framework that eventually uses the old
| APIs :)
| jtbayly wrote:
| He did another video with Windows 2k.
|
| Spoiler: it was still just as fast.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Well of course it does.
|
| Why does it follow that software designed for modern hardware,
| running on modern hardware, should be slower than software
| designed for older hardware running on slightly newer hardware?
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Running Windows 10 on hardware with a larger gap in time
| doesn't match the benefits you see in this video. It's just
| slower.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I have a related issue to report: high power usage at idle(or
| should I say: no user interaction).
|
| In the past it was understandable, because those primitive 130nm,
| single-core CPUs had to keep spinning since performance scaling
| was still a relatively new thing back then.
|
| Despite all the advancements in the field it seems like more
| often than not each of those cores is up to something at all
| times.
|
| First thing I do with a new Android device is to limit the number
| of background processes. This causes occasional crashes of some
| apps, but the difference in general smoothness is noticeable.
|
| Meanwhile my laptop draws 30W seemingly doing nothing in
| particular.
|
| Launching HWiNFO halves that number which, if actually true, is
| properly insane.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think this is one area where long-standing assumptions
| underlying key architecture decisions are no longer true.
| Another one would be security, which is laughable in the
| desktop space.
| stcroixx wrote:
| The next generation of devs became focused on their tools.
| Explosion of programming languages and frameworks. Cloud and all
| its vendor lock in. Agile. CI/CD pipelines. K8. Constant re-
| invention of the wheel just because. Lunatics are running the
| asylum. It's embarrassing, frankly.
| lionkor wrote:
| I'm convinced that most closed source software made by big
| companies has sleep() everywhere. Theres just no other
| explanation. Maybe synchronous animations.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| If you get a bonus for improving performance then you'd
| certainly make sure there are some ready to remove before the
| next financial year
| guardiangod wrote:
| Things Windows 10 has to content with when executing a new
| binary, that Windows 3.51 didn't
|
| 1. Windows Defender anti-virus checking the binary and contacting
| MS' server for binary signing/black list
|
| 2. Kernel32 trampolines
|
| 3. All sorts of security mitigation techniques such as stack
| cookies setup etc.
|
| 4. Telemetry
|
| 5. Hardware accelerated GUI initiation vs 'dump everything to
| frame buffer in kernel GUI32 library'
|
| 6. Load fonts, graphics etc. that can work well beyond 640x480
|
| 7. Deal with the scheduler juggling hundreds of processes that
| let you from accessing winsock2 lib immediately, to have
| multiplex sound mixing, to system restore, all in the background.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > Windows Defender anti-virus checking the binary and
| contacting MS' server for binary signing/black list
|
| Are you sure this happens every time you start an executable? I
| assumed the definition list gets updated in fixed intervals
| instead of whenever you launch a program.
| abwizz wrote:
| i would assume that the information "when does user start
| program" is valuable and the list is finite, so there is some
| incentive to go for something in between.
| Krssst wrote:
| 8. Maybe out of topic but animations delaying the display of
| the window (can be disabled but is not on the video)
| abwizz wrote:
| sure, makes me wonder how much of this list could be scratched
| w/o anyone noticing.
|
| PS: ran w2k on a 1600x1200 21" crt
| Melatonic wrote:
| Windows 10 LTSC removes a lot of the crap - and even with
| defender and some of the other stuff you are talking about here
| it is insane responsive.
| x3874 wrote:
| But the worst part: people contributing on this site are
| contributing to this hell too.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Every developer for the past two decades has been banking on
| Moore to save them from the consequences of poorly written code
| and importing a boatload of 3rd party dependencies but Moore is
| running out of funds and the bill is coming due.
|
| That's what happened.
| toyg wrote:
| I think you can add a couple of decades to that statement.
| People were already complaining about poor C code, when you
| could write "proper" performant code in assembler...
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Back in the day I had a Windows NT 3.51 machine sitting on my
| desk, right next to a HP 9000 workstation (PA-RISC) running HP-
| UX; I do not remember the NT machine being this responsive. It
| wasn't terrible but I did most of my work on the 9000 because it
| felt faster than the NT machine.
|
| I wonder if the 600MHz machine in this video is fitted with an
| SSD of some sort, this would load applications far faster than
| the average hard drive from 1998.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| You might be onto something. As P3 class hardware started to
| age, IDE to CompactFlash adapters came on the market as an
| option to replace aging mechanical hard drives.
| navjack27 wrote:
| "the same apps" are not the same. Totally different binaries that
| load different compiled programs with different features and code
| and linked libraries.
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