[HN Gopher] Latest Android Runtime (ART) update led to apps star...
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Latest Android Runtime (ART) update led to apps starting 30% faster
Author : mikece
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-08-21 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5google.com)
| cubefox wrote:
| > _up to_ 30% on _some_ devices
|
| (emphasis mine)
| positr0n wrote:
| I can't believe a 30% performance improvement has been sitting
| there.. for 12 Android versions??
| Projectiboga wrote:
| Just startup. 1.5 seconds down to ~1 seconds. The actual
| improvement is that chunk can get security fixes directly
| rather than from the device manufactures. This is big for LG
| phone owners as LG exited the phone business and has stoped
| updates.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| My man...if only you knew
|
| 6 years ago an intern in chromeOS using Gem5 found an
| optimization in how Android's ART emits code that would help
| all in-order arm cores(a-5x) to the tune of 10%. A simple fix.
| He prototyped it. It worked. Fix was a dozen lines. It never
| shipped...
| doomslice wrote:
| You gotta save that optimization for when performance ends up
| on a top level OKR!
| codethief wrote:
| What's the reason it never shipped?
| dimator wrote:
| I love how people say things like "it never shipped" and
| assume it was all just political or nefarious or ineptitude.
|
| I can guarantee that there was a huge thread about this in
| the bug, and it was not as simple as "nah don't ship it".
| There are many technical reasons/tradeoffs involved, and
| sometimes perfectly reasonable improvements are not possible.
| That's at every software org.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'll go ahead and vouch for it, I can't speak to the bug
| specifically, but everything they've said tracks, and I
| have a really funny similar story (different orgs).
|
| It's odd, and not what I heard much about FAANG say 5 years
| ago, but it is what it is.
|
| Among root causes:
|
| - people hate tattletales
|
| - everyone is overworked.
|
| - no second-level manager has enough time or upside to run
| an investigation every time a first-level manager says "no
| they forgot about {concurrency|tps report v2.1|memory use}"
| and another first-level manager, not responsible for the
| code, says its fine.
|
| - hell, your first-level manager doesn't have upside
| because it's just conflict. If you got someone knocking
| around for you, you got a good one.
|
| EDIT: Here's a thread with similar tales.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853039
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > I can guarantee
|
| Really? Cause only one of us saw this whole thing through
| from start to end...
|
| It boiled down to "stay in your lane, chromeOS team".
| refulgentis wrote:
| Lol. All of my time at G is summed up very elegantly here.
| jshier wrote:
| This naturally happens when engineering orgs are feature rather
| than result or quality oriented. As another random example,
| Apple shipped autolayout in iOS 7 with greater than quadratic
| performance as the number of constraints increased. It wasn't
| until iOS 12 that they made it simply linear, a well known
| optimization of linear algebra systems (autolayout is largely a
| simultaneous equation solver).
| wffurr wrote:
| You can read the article and the linked Android developer blog
| post if you want to get a glimpse of why this is so
| complicated.
| wffurr wrote:
| https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/08/latest-art...
| has a lot more details.
| ncr100 wrote:
| But they don't talk about what they did to improve the speed of
| ART.
|
| They talk about how they modularized. That's about it. Kind of
| not really worth reading. Seems more like a, "yay we managed to
| modularize some things" self congratulation, rather than
| getting something useful to the community.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Usually that is reserved for Google IO and Android DevEx
| talks.
|
| Also the article does indeed describe some examples of what
| was optimized.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Google IO
|
| You mean marketing party?
| dcgudeman wrote:
| why is it bad for them to market their products?
| pjmlp wrote:
| A party with several technical gems.
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(page generated 2023-08-21 23:01 UTC)