<story><title>Why modern software is slow</title><url>https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>barbariangrunge</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a game developer and game performance is better than ever. 144 Hz monitor? 4k? We got you covered. Even ray tracing and VR is on the way.&lt;p&gt;Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger. If you optimize those websites, they run super fast though, but it&amp;#x27;s quite a pain to do with the dependency bloat in modern tech stacks...&lt;p&gt;(note: games lag as well when you drag in a million dependencies you don&amp;#x27;t need)&lt;p&gt;The thing is, most sites and web apps try to solve a user problem, and if you are the only company in town that solves that problem, then performance barely matters - what matters is solving the problem. The users will put up with some pain because the problem is even more painful.&lt;p&gt;With games, it&amp;#x27;s all about the experience of interacting with the software - so performance is (hopefully, depending on your team and budget) amazing.&lt;p&gt;That, and... performance tuning is hard work, and I think most people don&amp;#x27;t know much about it. It&amp;#x27;s a fractal rabbit hole. Cache misses, garbage collection, streaming, object pooling, dealing with stale pointers, etc. Even I have a ton to learn, and no matter how much I learn, I probably still will have a lot more to learn. It&amp;#x27;s easier for many teams to hand wave it I guess as long as they aren&amp;#x27;t losing too many customers because of it.</text></item><item><author>klabb3</author><text>Alternative hypothesis: (brace yourselves) people don&amp;#x27;t care enough. Any vendor will prioritize requirements, if performance is not in there, that CPU and memory is going to be used if in any way it helps the developers. Conversely, by looking at a system you can infer its requirements.&lt;p&gt;For commercial airplanes it may be safety first, ticket price second (passenger capacity, fuel efficiency) and speed third. For most software, functionality, signing up for a subscription, platform availability etc are usually prioritized higher than response times and keyboard shortcuts.&lt;p&gt;Game devs worry a lot about latency and frame rates and professional software care a lot about keyboard shortcuts. This proves (anecdotally) that performance isn&amp;#x27;t unacheivable at all, but rather deprioritized. Nobody wants slow apps but it&amp;#x27;s just that developer velocity, metrics, ads etc etc are higher priorities, and that comes with a cpu and memory cost that the vendor doesn&amp;#x27;t care about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>Older readers will remember when you&amp;#x27;d buy a computer magazine printed on paper and at least 80% of it was ads. Which often didn&amp;#x27;t change from month to month.&lt;p&gt;Massive slabs of wood pulp had to be printed and shipped to all to the stores that stocked them, at huge cost, just so you could manhandle one of them home.&lt;p&gt;And the content was mostly physical bloat.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the modern web. Except that you don&amp;#x27;t just get the ads, you get some of the machinery that serves them - at you, specifically, based on your browsing profile, which is used to decide which ads you see.&lt;p&gt;I always refuse all cookies. When I forget to do that for some reason it&amp;#x27;s obvious just how much slower the experience gets.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why modern software is slow</title><url>https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>barbariangrunge</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a game developer and game performance is better than ever. 144 Hz monitor? 4k? We got you covered. Even ray tracing and VR is on the way.&lt;p&gt;Most games render frames of a 3D world in less than 17ms, but most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger. If you optimize those websites, they run super fast though, but it&amp;#x27;s quite a pain to do with the dependency bloat in modern tech stacks...&lt;p&gt;(note: games lag as well when you drag in a million dependencies you don&amp;#x27;t need)&lt;p&gt;The thing is, most sites and web apps try to solve a user problem, and if you are the only company in town that solves that problem, then performance barely matters - what matters is solving the problem. The users will put up with some pain because the problem is even more painful.&lt;p&gt;With games, it&amp;#x27;s all about the experience of interacting with the software - so performance is (hopefully, depending on your team and budget) amazing.&lt;p&gt;That, and... performance tuning is hard work, and I think most people don&amp;#x27;t know much about it. It&amp;#x27;s a fractal rabbit hole. Cache misses, garbage collection, streaming, object pooling, dealing with stale pointers, etc. Even I have a ton to learn, and no matter how much I learn, I probably still will have a lot more to learn. It&amp;#x27;s easier for many teams to hand wave it I guess as long as they aren&amp;#x27;t losing too many customers because of it.</text></item><item><author>klabb3</author><text>Alternative hypothesis: (brace yourselves) people don&amp;#x27;t care enough. Any vendor will prioritize requirements, if performance is not in there, that CPU and memory is going to be used if in any way it helps the developers. Conversely, by looking at a system you can infer its requirements.&lt;p&gt;For commercial airplanes it may be safety first, ticket price second (passenger capacity, fuel efficiency) and speed third. For most software, functionality, signing up for a subscription, platform availability etc are usually prioritized higher than response times and keyboard shortcuts.&lt;p&gt;Game devs worry a lot about latency and frame rates and professional software care a lot about keyboard shortcuts. This proves (anecdotally) that performance isn&amp;#x27;t unacheivable at all, but rather deprioritized. Nobody wants slow apps but it&amp;#x27;s just that developer velocity, metrics, ads etc etc are higher priorities, and that comes with a cpu and memory cost that the vendor doesn&amp;#x27;t care about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Test0129</author><text>I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I&amp;#x27;m not going to download 70 GB every time I want to play something. The size has gotten absurd.</text></comment>