Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gok

Awesomely, this blog post of less than 200 words and one screenshot loads over 1.41 MB for me.

Software expands to fill all available resources.

View on HN

For the few among us who haven't read "The Website Obesity Crisis", this is as good an excuse as any to link it again:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

The only issue I have with that site is that it's awful to look at.

Sorry for the extra bandwidth, forgot to optimize the images.

Well that's your answer to your question. You forgot to optimize the images, because with your test environment, you don't notice it.

If you were testing over a dial-up connection, you would notice it.

Same with app writers. They forgot to optimize their app because they're testing it on the latest and greatest phones on their home network (or a corporate network which is blazing fast). If they tested on a low-end phone, and actually performed the update themselves over a slow cell network, they'd probably notice it.

Many common tools aren't set up for common-sense optimization. Ideally resizing images would be an automatic step, and you wouldn't have to remember. But that's not the case.

I'm sure that there are plenty of iPhone apps with 2 MB images from a camera, when a 256 KB image would do.

I used to work at a shop that ran a 1.5 mbps dsl line, and a ~5 year old, cheap, slow computer. If their code worked on that, it would work on any of our customer's machines.

I wish devs would still test like that. Sure, your app works fine in downtown SF on the newest phone, but try using it in Nowherseville, TN, on a phone that is more than a couple years old. I bet a lot of user frustration comes from dealing with that.

> Sure, your app works fine in downtown SF on the newest phone, but try using it in Nowherseville, TN

Granting that you heavily imply a 4G connection, the choice of "Nowherseville, TN" is extremely interesting: Chattanooga, TN — which as a Tennessean I feel is essentially "Nowheresville" to most non-Tennesseans — has Internet service multiple orders of magnitude better than most of the Bay Area[1]…

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17...

I can agree that may be a bad example, but I think the point is fairly clear.

I do not, however, mean to imply a 4g connection. Many people don't even get that.

The Spotify app is dog slow on a Samsung S8+. Do you know how ridiculously overspecced this phone is and it can't load a Winamp clone with a terrible UI!

Hell, all of Android is far, far slower than it should be. I won't move to iOS but what Apple can do with a dual core phone is pretty amazing (and yes, I know that newer OS builds get slower).

I really wish android came with better tools to let you know what is bogging down the machine. If only they hadn't gutted the linux part of it, we could have much better tools at our fingertips....

Does anyone know of a good process-viewer/resource watcher for android?

Google killed all of the outside tooling by messing with their own variant of IntelliJ and build system. (Especially the latter. Eclipse plugin for gradle w/ android support is hopelessly incomplete, killing eclim which was the one reasonable code completion software.)

Apparently writing an IntelliJ plugin of a reasonable quality is much harder than a Python or other script. Who would have thought. And a glorified text editor takes GBs of RAM, likewise a glorified Makefile.

(The resource watcher is built into Android Studio, but ignores GPU memory. To do that you have to run GPU debugger, a separate memory hog.)

Sure, but the apps the blog talks about aren't two-man teams. And some of these firms were already touted as dogfooding their apps under resource constraints-

https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/10/27/facebook-starts-2...

They should be doing better than this.

Images do not seem to be the biggest culprit (unless you already fixed them). I see 200kB of images and 600kB of javascript (most of which comes from disqus)

So which huge apps did you delete? Oh, none. Now you have your answer to why they don't optimize for app size.

For those who don't know, this is Parkinson's law :-)

yes! Do you remember where you learned of it by name?

(It came up for me in Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com