begin quoting Gabriel Sechan as of Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 05:52:07PM -0500: > > >From: Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [snip] > >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.
Why should those things affect UI responsiveness? Sure, when you save, you don't want the user to save _again_ before you've finished. But that can be done by greying out the Save... and Save As... menu-items and remapping <mod>-S to <beep> -- there's no need to lock up the rest of the app while a save is underway, is there? Same for processing... So I _do_ something computationally intensive. Why should that affect the UI? The processor's idle time goes from 99% to 1%, say, but that's a poor reason for my mouse to start moving jerkily. > 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. I find startup lags to be annoying when there's no feedback. And that's software design, really. [snip] > 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. Yup. My main machine is a 500MHz Blade 100. It works fine. I just couldn't handle the typical PC upgrade cycle. (Plus, the high turnover rate needed to keep up the cashflow to PC vendors is REALLY BAD for the environment, AFAIAC.) [snip] > >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. Virtualizing shouldn't be _that_ much of a hit; it would be drowned out by the time-slicing effects anyway. Assuming equal loading, you'd turn a 2GHz machine into two something-less-than-1GHz machines... then again, as most of the time machines are not running at top speed, that should not be THAT noticable. > 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 Twenty years ago I couldn't out-type my computer.... > 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). Bleah. I would studiously avoide any such web-page. > 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, #include <std.amiga.story> A 7Mhz Amiga could multitask like that. Granted, it didn't have any memory protection, but we've got machines that are what, two-and-a-half ORDERS of magnitude faster now? It's obscene how much more processing power we have, with not much to show for it.... > but when you talk about 10% slow down to feature creep here, ....I think it's more than 10% to feature creep. :-/ > and 10% due to language there, and 10% to virtualization here, you're > suddenly finding yourself slowed way down. Nah, not suddenly. You can watch it. I used to play a lot of XGalaga on my 266MHz AXP multia. (It was a fast machine in its day. Don't laugh. Well, not too hard.) I ran RedHat, as they seemed the best thing going. Each version of RedHat (and I bought the point-version upgrades!) was slower than the previous version, until the day came that XGalaga, under TWM, was too slow and jerky to be playable. I started reconsidering what 'progress' meant about then. > 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. I think it's a matter of user expectations. The average user will put up with a certain amount of pain, and so that's what we get. If they'd put up with any more, we'd get that instead. If we go to a heavily virtualizaed and/or VM-based infrastructure, it won't be long before the hardware catches up and the applications are again "good enough" -- not too much pain, but certainly not painless. -Stewart
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