wow, software really is fast... sort of

thetrivialstuff · 2009-10-18 00:04:06

So I discovered today that on modern hardware, most of the things I consider the worst of the worst bloat offenders... actually run decently. (Firefox and OpenOffice, I'm looking at you.)

I'm cheap, to the point that I only upgrade my hardware every 5 years, maybe even less than that. I just inherited a 3-year-old laptop and it's probably the newest thing I've ever run. I'm surprised at how quickly things run on here, and now I finally understand why modern software is so poorly optimized: the developers probably run new-ish machines too. They don't notice that their code is inefficient.

I therefore pledge that if I'm ever working on software other people might want to run, I will only do it on 10-year-old hardware. Who's with me?

MP2E · 2009-10-18 01:02:09

thetrivialstuff wrote:

So I discovered today that on modern hardware, most of the things I consider the worst of the worst bloat offenders... actually run decently. (Firefox and OpenOffice, I'm looking at you.)
I'm cheap, to the point that I only upgrade my hardware every 5 years, maybe even less than that. I just inherited a 3-year-old laptop and it's probably the newest thing I've ever run. I'm surprised at how quickly things run on here, and now I finally understand why modern software is so poorly optimized: the developers probably run new-ish machines too. They don't notice that their code is inefficient.
I therefore pledge that if I'm ever working on software other people might want to run, I will only do it on 10-year-old hardware. Who's with me?

I agree, I think that limited conditions makes the best of tools. I use this theory to blame the decline of fun in video games(I prefer older video games to ANYTHING recent)

Doehni · 2009-10-18 01:17:51

I'm absolutely with you! My laptop is from spring 2003.
It takes 10 minutes to load Win XP an everytime I switch a tab in Firefox I have to wait 10 secons...
In Linux it's far better, buf Openoffice still needs 1-2 min to show the file.

umpalumpa1985 · 2009-10-18 10:11:36

Heh. I agree on the video games. I have an Xbox and all i play on it (thanks to a software mod) is NES and SNES games. As far as software on newer hardware, i couldn't agree more. I had the pleasure of using Arch on my buddy's new core2duo machine. Wow.

Squall90 · 2009-10-18 12:05:03

umpalumpa1985 wrote:

Heh. I agree on the video games. I have an Xbox and all i play on it (thanks to a software mod) is NES and SNES games.

Lol, that's great!

I think you're right. Programs should written more efficient. The Laptop of my mum is just 6-7 years old and its default operating system is Windows XP. The Laptop takes up to 5 minutes to boot and Firefox needs a lot of time to show itself. Okay, 6-7 is a lot of time in computer science, but I think that the delivered operating system should work on this machine quite well and also standard tools like browsers shouldn't eat the ram and cpu.

Last edited by Squall90 (2009-10-18 12:06:10)

Duologic · 2009-10-18 13:23:39

Doehni wrote:

... Openoffice still needs 1-2 min to show the file.

go-openoffice solved that problem for me!

Mountainjew · 2009-10-18 13:46:40

I don't think it's an issue of efficiency. More an issue of features. More and more programs such as Firefox etc have way more features than would have been expected on older machines. Hence, the software is just keeping up with the hardware, and that's not a bad thing. We all want more features in our programs right?

alexandrite · 2009-10-18 13:47:42

Hear, Hear! Using the hardware to cover up the inefficiency of your code is one of the flimsiest excuses in the book for programmers to not do their jobs. In this day and age, I would think the sheer number of applications that can run fast even on legacy machines would be enough proof that people can write efficient code without spending as much time and money as everyone seems so scared of spending.

tomd123 · 2009-10-18 17:53:43

thetrivialstuff wrote:

So I discovered today that on modern hardware, most of the things I consider the worst of the worst bloat offenders... actually run decently. (Firefox and OpenOffice, I'm looking at you.)
I'm cheap, to the point that I only upgrade my hardware every 5 years, maybe even less than that. I just inherited a 3-year-old laptop and it's probably the newest thing I've ever run. I'm surprised at how quickly things run on here, and now I finally understand why modern software is so poorly optimized: the developers probably run new-ish machines too. They don't notice that their code is inefficient.
I therefore pledge that if I'm ever working on software other people might want to run, I will only do it on 10-year-old hardware. Who's with me?

Hopefully you will never develop any main stream games.

edit: typo

Last edited by tomd123 (2009-10-18 17:54:07)

ASOM · 2009-10-18 18:14:37

Even though I run some pretty serious gear, I stay on the light side with my software. While I do enjoy spending some time at my rig, computers are not my main interest so the quicker a task gets done the quicker I can get on with what I truly enjoy. Bloat and inefficient code seems to take about 10% of my life so I just say no to it.

thetrivialstuff · 2009-10-18 19:26:44

Mountainjew wrote:

I don't think it's an issue of efficiency. More an issue of features. More and more programs such as Firefox etc have way more features than would have been expected on older machines. Hence, the software is just keeping up with the hardware, and that's not a bad thing. We all want more features in our programs right?

I don't buy this at all. For web browsers, yes, a lot of it is JavaScript's fault (or rather, the people who wrote the web pages and thought they needed 2MB of JavaScript to drive it -- I'm looking at you, Facebook). But otherwise, really, what is a web browser doing? Rendering static text and graphics. Yes, the text and graphics occasionally move or change colours, but in computer terms that basically counts as static content.

There are also flash videos and games, but what of them? Computers have been able to play full-screen, full-motion video since the Pentium II 200MHz (I remember being astounded when I first saw one doing that). H.264 is a bit more strenuous and requires about a 1.5 GHz machine to decode smoothly at the sizes we're seeing for the most hi-res web video. Flash games are simple graphics, mostly, and even a full screen game only displays the kind of graphics we expected to be full-motion on our PII 200MHz.

So why the heck does a full-screen Flash game involving nothing more than antialiased stick people run slowly on a 1.5GHz machine?! That's nothing but Flash's inefficiency.

And why do large websites in general (e.g. CBC News, Facebook) act sluggish on a 3GHz machine with hyperthreading? I'll buy them being slow because of all the excess JavaScript on an 800 MHz machine, maybe a 1 GHz, but 3 GHz with hyperthreading... even a page filled with nothing but infinite loops should be snappy with that kind of computational power.

Modern web browsers really don't have any more features than Opera did when it was version 5 or 6. I ran Opera 5 on an original Pentium at 133 MHz, and it loaded and performed faster than Firefox 3.5 does on my 1GHz laptop. A lot faster. The basic elements of what makes up a web page hasn't really changed since then.

thetrivialstuff · 2009-10-18 19:31:38

tomd123 wrote:

Hopefully you will never develop any main stream games.

Well, I didn't mean to say that there was *nothing* that required modern hardware's extra power. Games are one such thing. High-end video editing and encoding/decoding is another. But things like web browsing, word processing, etc. -- software we write nowadays to do those things should bloody well be efficient enough that I can run them on a 486 or a Pentium I (assuming we don't need floating point arithmetic of course ).

I mean that quite literally -- the 486 was fast enough to do really decent word processing, but for some reason word processing software written now, even if it has no more features than winword 6.0, could not feasibly run on such a machine. That's what I'm ticked off about.

wuischke · 2009-10-18 20:11:34

In my experience, that's to a large extend due to a higher abstraction level (a.k.a. bloated libraries) and more features.

It's not necessarily a bad thing - my computer (at 1.6GHz pretty slow) is easily fast enough to run most of the things I want and programming and using a computer is arguably more comfortable now than 10 years ago.

Take for instance Python - it's very slow and inefficient compared to C. But I can just start a REPL and type an inefficient one-liner solving my problem almost without delay. Solving the same problem on a 486 with C on the other hand would have taken a long time both for writing the code as for running the program.

The feature creep on the other hand is a double-edged sword. Of course, having wobbly windows or a real-time spell checker in my browser is a nice thing, but many features are just not necessary for most users.

Well, Flash in contrast is just plain horrible (I have sometimes stuttering videos - considering that even my BeagleBoard is fast enough for 720P it's absolutely not acceptable) and there are many more examples of bad software.

And too many things are just not as instantaneous as they should be. Why should I have to wait for my computer to boot or a program to start, when my computer is so much faster than a computer 10 years ago? I hope that SSDs will help the hardware to catch up with the software in this regard.

cerbie · 2009-10-21 14:24:39

thetrivialstuff wrote:

So I discovered today that on modern hardware, most of the things I consider the worst of the worst bloat offenders... actually run decently. (Firefox and OpenOffice, I'm looking at you.)
I'm cheap, to the point that I only upgrade my hardware every 5 years, maybe even less than that. I just inherited a 3-year-old laptop and it's probably the newest thing I've ever run. I'm surprised at how quickly things run on here, and now I finally understand why modern software is so poorly optimized: the developers probably run new-ish machines too. They don't notice that their code is inefficient.
I therefore pledge that if I'm ever working on software other people might want to run, I will only do it on 10-year-old hardware. Who's with me?

My notebook is from 2001, and has 384MB RAM. My only major issues, even with bloated software, are RAM (upgradable to 1GB), and X not double buffering (the only reason I keep Windows installed, now). I'm hoping for ARM A9 based smartbooks, with decent size keyboards, and modern GPU(s).

Firefox can be called bloated all day long, but once Epiphany, Seamonkey, or Opera (I seem to dislike most all webkit browsers, if you notice a lack of them, here--it's kind of weird) start going into the swap file, they slow down to the point of timing out downloads (no response in 60+s) and generally become unusable, with Opera being the worst offender, by far. The leanest browser in the world won't not go into swap with modern web pages and only ~300MB RAM. OOo and KOffice 2 both seem to work fine, as well, as long as there is spare RAM for them. Flash is bad, but, well, it's Adobe (VLC/ffmpeg can play downloaded flash videos better than Flash can...). Even my old PIII can manage running full Python applications just fine. The worst seems to be Toucan, staying around 20% CPU when actually working.

I like light and lean software, but more out of love of snappiness, and it fitting how I like to use my computer, than out of resource scarcity. Even the above notebook can comfortably run KDE 4, with little tweaking to lower RAM use and eye-candy a bit.

While software should be made to be efficient at what it does, I welcome additional features, and and quality abstraction, even when using old hardware. 'Cause even old hardware is usually fast enough. It just gets bad reputations from certain samples (multiple Celeron generations), and big vendors tending to sell machines with too little RAM or crappy video until very recently.

Last edited by cerbie (2009-10-21 14:25:52)

Duologic · 2009-10-21 18:38:19

cerbie wrote:

...Firefox can be called bloated all day long, but once Epiphany, Seamonkey, or Opera (I seem to dislike most all webkit browsers, if you notice a lack of them, here--it's kind of weird) start going into the swap file...

Opera != webkit browser
Opera uses Presto

(just a mistake)

cerbie · 2009-10-21 22:41:21

No, I mean that I haven't found any webkit browser (save Opera, they're all Gecko) that I like the UI of well enough to use for long enough to start eating up my RAM; not that Opera used webkit. Though, I didn't know they had a special name for their engine, until just now. Though, it looks like if I install a new version of Epiphany, it won't be Gecko. So if the UI and stability are the same, I may soon include a webkit browser .

Last edited by cerbie (2009-10-21 22:49:43)

dunz0r · 2009-10-22 17:10:43

I totally agree.Uzbl is the only browser that for me even touches what a browser should be. It's just a browser. If you want it to do more you'll have to do it your self.

opothehippo · 2009-10-24 01:06:36

I run a core 2 duo, with 4 Gigs of ram and 1/4 Gig video card. Software like firefox or openoffice (I use both regularly) are still very sluggish. I prefer command line tools, they seem like the only ones that aren't miserable.

techprophet · 2009-10-24 01:38:59

opothehippo wrote:

I run a core 2 duo, with 4 Gigs of ram and 1/4 Gig video card. Software like firefox or openoffice (I use both regularly) are still very sluggish. I prefer command line tools, they seem like the only ones that aren't miserable.

My setup is almost identical. Core 2 Quad, 2 Gigs of ram. but other than that, everything is the same. And FF and OO.org are still sluggish

thetrivialstuff · 2009-10-30 04:22:51

dunz0r wrote:

I totally agree. Uzbl is the only browser that for me even touches what a browser should be. It's just a browser. If you want it to do more you'll have to do it your self.

Seconded. I still haven't tried uzbl; can't install it on my desktop til I upgrade the kernel (long story), but I'm looking forward to it.

Honestly though, I wish modern websites were made to work in text-only (in theory they should be, for "accessibility") -- if that were the case I'd just do everything in Links/Lynx. I love the amount of mental effort saved by using console-based e-mail clients -- I've almost forgotten what it's like to receive e-mail from people who think purple 16 point courier sans MS is an appropriate e-mail font, or people who like graphic smilies. All I see is blissfully plain console font from those jackasses; it's wonderful.

I wish the web were like that.

eDio · 2009-10-30 04:37:19

My few cents...
About games:
You may take an interesting game from 2003 and run it smoothly on maximum preferences and it'll look great.
You may take game from 2007, not more interesting then the previous one. To run smoothly it should be tuned to minimum preferences and even with this it'll lag. But wats more, it'll look ugly.

RetroX · 2009-10-31 12:57:44

I completely agree with you. The desktop I am using right now is from 2001. Now, I'd consider it state-of-the-art for its time. I have a 1GHz Athlon (32-bit, single core) which ran the fastest of any computer I used at the time. I have an ATI Radeon 9000 FireGL with 64MB of memory, a great card at the time.

Right now, it runs Arch beautifully. What pains me, however, is how so many people refuse to make software efficiently. On modern computers, you cannot tell the difference in speed very easily. On my box, it's clear. Just because it's a newer software does not give you the right to remove efficiency because "you need a better computer."

This is part of the reason why I switched to Arch, and GNU in general.

And, for the record, Go-OpenOffice takes about 5-10 seconds to open a file on my computer, and Firefox runs as smooth as ever (in Arch).

Last edited by RetroX (2009-10-31 12:58:46)

iBertus · 2009-10-31 13:37:07

The shear number of features included in most modern software prohibits development without using tons of bloated external libraries. Back in the day, less support was needed for multiple platforms or multiple architectures and code could be written in a very optimized way. Now, abstraction and code re-use is a major contributor to slow down. No more is a section of slow code recrafted in assembly to make sure the program doesn't stall. This isn't the fault of the developer but rather the developer's employer.

BTW, I'm running Arch on dual Intel Xeon Quad-Core CPUs w/ 8GB FB-DIMM 800MHz and a pair of GTX280 1GB graphics cards and Flash still sucks on Linux. Most other things are fast, but it still bothers me that transfering large files on Linux makes my system crawl. This wasn't an issue on even Windows 2000.

pacman · 2009-10-31 17:10:33

^^ when mplayer handles the same content remarkably faster, i think you have to ask yourself if it's really a code re-usability tax or just foul play.

Jimi · 2009-10-31 18:55:48

MP2E wrote:

thetrivialstuff wrote:
So I discovered today that on modern hardware, most of the things I consider the worst of the worst bloat offenders... actually run decently. (Firefox and OpenOffice, I'm looking at you.)
I'm cheap, to the point that I only upgrade my hardware every 5 years, maybe even less than that. I just inherited a 3-year-old laptop and it's probably the newest thing I've ever run. I'm surprised at how quickly things run on here, and now I finally understand why modern software is so poorly optimized: the developers probably run new-ish machines too. They don't notice that their code is inefficient.
I therefore pledge that if I'm ever working on software other people might want to run, I will only do it on 10-year-old hardware. Who's with me?
I agree, I think that limited conditions makes the best of tools. I use this theory to blame the decline of fun in video games(I prefer older video games to ANYTHING recent)

agreed!!

counterstrike 1.6 > source!
n64 > all

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-18 00:04:06

wow, software really is fast... sort of

#2 2009-10-18 01:02:09

Re: wow, software really is fast... sort of

#3 2009-10-18 01:17:51

Re: wow, software really is fast... sort of

#4 2009-10-18 10:11:36

Re: wow, software really is fast... sort of

#5 2009-10-18 12:05:03

Re: wow, software really is fast... sort of

#6 2009-10-18 13:23:39

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#7 2009-10-18 13:46:40

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#8 2009-10-18 13:47:42

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#9 2009-10-18 17:53:43

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#10 2009-10-18 18:14:37

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#11 2009-10-18 19:26:44

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#12 2009-10-18 19:31:38

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#13 2009-10-18 20:11:34

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#14 2009-10-21 14:24:39

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#15 2009-10-21 18:38:19

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#16 2009-10-21 22:41:21

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#17 2009-10-22 17:10:43

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#18 2009-10-24 01:06:36

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#19 2009-10-24 01:38:59

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#20 2009-10-30 04:22:51

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#21 2009-10-30 04:37:19

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#22 2009-10-31 12:57:44

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#23 2009-10-31 13:37:07

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#24 2009-10-31 17:10:33

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#25 2009-10-31 18:55:48

Re: wow, software really is fast... sort of

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