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

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!

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.

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).

>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.