Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

The real trick is whether or not users care about:

A) This works on all of the platforms that we use

B) Performance could be better on my computer

It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine.

For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.

View on HN

> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...

Really???

Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously.

I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.

----

Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look).

Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn't it? https://www.wavefront.com/

Couldn't see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn't take the product seriously.

Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven't experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I'd probably conclude that it's more than it needs to be, but I haven't had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years.

As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at least five years.

It's mostly CPU performances I experience. Rendering any video, gif, website takes sizeable CPU power (for a cheap CPU in power saving mode).

Never had issue with RAM. I can remember a few friends who bought netbooks with 2GB memory some years ago, they quickly realized that they simply cannot run their development environment in that. (I'm talking swap death where a click that should take 1 second to act takes 1 entire minute).

Right now I'm using a backup laptop with Intel Celeron. It runs most apps fine. Web sites like Hacker News come up easily and snappily. The CPU fan kicks in when I watch a high-quality movie. It also kicks in on small, web apps. Kicks in big time on Youtube and Facebook. Everything on those is sluggish compared to my native apps. Even if non-technical, I'd know stuff was about to slow down when I go into my browser.

Just bad tools leading to waste users notice. Best to avoid them if possible. Not always possible...

> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded,

5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It's also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won't be the same HD that exists in 5 years (i.e., 4k), and it's sensible that a budget laptop today will struggle with the 8k technology that comes out 5 years from now. This is an old problem (pun intended) and should not be surprising.

> Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have.

Selection bias. Programmers who compile code, run VMs or containers, and process tons of data, are not the average consumer laptop use case and have much stricter requirements. Many people are sitting in Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, or Google Docs for most of their day-- and likely inside of Chrome.

Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?

The idea that Electron is any different of a user experience for the vast majority of users seems skewed to developer usage, to me.

I meant 1080p when I said full HD.

It takes a surprising amount of power to decode. The cheap CPU from netbooks have been struggling for a decade, especially in battery power saving mode.

Lately, they get hardware acceleration just for that. Special CPU instructions and drivers just to achieve that decently.

For Youtube in particular, they're sending VP9+opus where the browser supports it, without considering hardware acceleration. The rather anaemic Atom chips might have H264 decoding on-chip, but only Kabylake has VP9.

I don't know, 5+ years isn't that old anymore for a computer. Like, 5 years ago I was running... a core i7 with 4GB of ram. And now I'm running... a core i7 with 16GB of ram. The only things in computers that have really gotten significantly faster are SSDs and GPUs

'Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?'

Ehhh, you're in one, I think?

> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.

Are they all netbooks? Because those were crap the day they came out and even more crap 5 years later. You can find terrible discount desktop machines that can't handle anything just as easy as you can find terrible laptops.

My laptop is 5 years old and the only time I feel a lack of performance is when the Swift compiler fires up. Your example link came up right away (OK it burns away 30% of a core, but I got 4 of those).

They are not crap by any standard, they are simply low spec.

A core i3/i5 starts at 150$, most devices don't have these expensive CPU.

Even a 1000$ macbook from 5 years ago would have one of the first i3/i5. It would struggle to read 1080p video, unless plugged to a wall plug with the span spinning seriously.

Just an anecdote, but my 2011 Lenovo x220 with i5 running macOS Sierra plays this site in Chrome with around 30% CPU use, everything is snappy still

> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems.

This annoys me a lot, for one of two reasons. Either:

1. Some developers have no idea what performance means -- it's crazy that I have time to notice a spinner when a glorified IRC client starts up or switches tabs, let alone have time to watch it for tens of seconds.

or:

2. If these developers are claiming they have no performance problems, clearly the laptops that can handle modern applications are being hoarded, and I have no way to obtain one of these magical machines. All I can get are recent i7 processors.

On point 1: Also there's still the effect where your app does the same thing a native app would do in an equally reasonable time but uses twice as much power to do it.

3. Battery life is excluded from "performance".

I agree with both of these.

With the power that even average machines have now, it beggars belief that we ever see a spinner at all for normal desktop-related stuff.

>It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.

That's a complete other story... All that big open source movement for decades and in 2017 we are still depending on proprietary systems to provide a chat(!) for a company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com