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Comment by neves | Hacker News Reader

I didn't make a real trace, but was impressed when I saw the amount of CPU was being wasted for the the three cloud drives that I had: Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox and Google Drive. They all offer some free extra space when you login from a new machine and I accepted all of them. When I disabled them all my machine were much more responsive.

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You'd be amazed at the amount of disk IO wasted by these programs, then.

Can somebody tell the Dropbox developers that right after boot is the exact wrong time to kill disk performance with a massive number of very random, very short reads? Jesus. People want to use their newly booted PC, not wait for Dropbox to realize nothing has changed after all while it chokes the browser being started.

I figure they don't notice because they have two PCIE 512GB SSD disks in a raid0 in their dev boxes. They need to test this stuff with spinning rust.

I'm a developer for a large organization and every year or two I snag a laptop on the way out of the bottom of the replacement cycle. When I have it out people sometimes come by and are shocked, "You're a developer, what are you doing with that thing? It must be the oldest laptop in the whole agency!"

And I tell them, "Exactly. If I make my app run well on this laptop, I know for sure it will run acceptably on every machine here."

A company I used to work for had a slow DSL line, with a ~7 year old pc, that they'd use to test their web-apps. That way, if it was responsive on that, then it'd be responsive on the customer's pc. I wish more companies tried this, instead of pushing the limit of what their expensive work-provided desktops could do.

Facebook has been experimenting with "2G Tuesdays", providing an option for developers to test using the site with slow / laggy internet connections:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesd...

This guy has a good write up on using netem to impair a connection to simulate a wan connection.

Pretty handy for testing. I've used it to simulate a bad uplink in between a dslam and bras.

https://www.excentis.com/blog/use-linux-traffic-control-impa...

I was going to recommend traffic manipulation and traffic shaping with netem and tc. I set this up at my last employer in the lab for use with our networked IP radios and such. Stimulating poor network conditions has been a mainstay in my testing ever since, even now that I work on web apps and distributed services.

Good advice. It's a shame because it is quite possible to make those programs power efficient. Sloppiness.

For this reason on my MBA I've uninstalled Google Drive and now i only use Dropbox on demand, as in I start it every now and then to sync the files and then make it quit.

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