From: Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
begin quoting Gabriel Sechan as of Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 01:15:56PM -0500:
If you hear from people that they don't care so much about the UI
responsiveness, but _do_ care about absolute loading times and
processor-intensive task, then I am entirely in a different domain
that the sorts of people you hear from. (Not suprising, really...)
Where do we see performance issues, anyway? UI responsiveness. Program
loading. Program processing. IO throughput. What else? Can we nail down
all the bits of percieved performance?
I do get complaints about UI responsiveness, but it tends not to eb when
they're typing- it tends to be when they just hit save, or are doing
something else computationally or IOwise in the background.
I also hear a lot of complaints about network lag. The problem is that when
displaying website X, they get the lag to download it, parse and render it,
and parse and render any images and java/flash. This is a huge one.
I'd say for the most part it has to do with startup of an IO or
computationally expensive process, in combination with other work.
> know a lot of people running old versions of software on very new PCs,
> because anyone on slightly older PCs (2-3 years old) or running the most
> recent version of apps bitch like crazy about performance.
Do they also demand that NP-complete problems be solved in constant
time? (I actually heard this once floated as a requirement for a
program. Many years ago, thank goodness.)
No, but I don't think 2-3 year old PCs are excessively old. Not many people
are willing to put out a 1K investment for a less than 3 year return. Even
as a gamer I expect 2 years between upgrades, I refuse to do it more often.
> For myself- I've never had a problem with processor specific stuff.
> Granted, I don't own a PowerPC, Alpha, etc. But I know I'd be utterly
> unwilling to give up the rperformance to have everything in some byte
code
> and interpreted.
So nothing ever is "fast enough" for you? :)
Computers got "fast enough" for me a long time ago. Of course, with the
way things are going, I'm going to have to chase the bleeding edge, else
I'll once again be able to type faster than my word-processing
application....
Its possible to be fast enough, but bytecode interpreting kills way too much
performance. Virtualizing the processor would do the same.
As for fast enough- depends on your needs. For email, web (non-flash), and
word processing, it was fast enough 7 or 8 years ago. Of course, these days
a computer like that would have problems web surfing (I saw a web page with
a 2GHZ processor requirement the other day. I didn't follow the link, I
barely made specs). If you do multitasking- email open at all times, web
open at all times (multiple sites), mp3s playing, compiling something- you
want everything to be snappy. A reasonable PC can do that these days, but
when you talk about 10% slow down to feature creep here, and 10% due to
language there, and 10% to virtualization here, you're suddenly finding
yourself slowed way down. Thats why my current PC has more problems word
processing than my old Apple 2e did. Even on 5" floppies it loaded the
program in comparable time to OO and Office, and it never slowed to hell
when I hit save.
Gabe
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