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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 10 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.227s | source | bottom
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:32 UTC] No.36447314[source]▶
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!

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1. kitsunesoba ◴[23 Jun 23 15:12 UTC] No.36447949[source]▶
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.
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2. LanceH ◴[23 Jun 23 17:07 UTC] No.36449608[source]▶
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.

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3. the_overseer ◴[23 Jun 23 17:29 UTC] No.36449854[source]▶
Is this missing an /s?
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4. zackees ◴[23 Jun 23 17:43 UTC] No.36450020{3}[source]▶
Yeah 10 browser tabs on brave my ubuntu grinds to a halt.
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5. ◴[23 Jun 23 17:44 UTC] No.36450044[source]▶
6. ecshafer ◴[23 Jun 23 18:37 UTC] No.36450631[source]▶
Ruby on Rails is plenty fast, especially with Turbo. The biggest RoR speed drop is n+1 queries imo.
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7. snovv_crash ◴[23 Jun 23 19:30 UTC] No.36451210[source]▶
If you disable the virus scanner and write a simple SDL app on Windows it will open instantly as well.
8. Arwill ◴[23 Jun 23 20:17 UTC] No.36451720[source]▶
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.
9. viraptor ◴[23 Jun 23 20:52 UTC] No.36452030{3}[source]▶
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)
10. simooooo ◴[24 Jun 23 06:10 UTC] No.36456039{4}[source]▶
My Ubuntu uses snap for key applications which take 10+ seconds to start