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Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

This post is honestly rocking my world.

I've always been telling people that having lots of icons on your desktop will maybe use a little bit more ram, but it won't slow your computer down because computers are super fast.

How many other assumptions of mine are false? Would I have faster browser experience if I deleted some bookmarks, or if I deleted my browsing history? Would my computer run more quickly if I have fewer folders on my disk? Would gmail be faster if I had hundreds of emails instead of tens of thousands of emails?

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It is stunning that the problem was in such a highly visible location, but the idea that your operating system becomes slow after years of use has always been a thing. Reinstalling Windows was something I would do every couple of years, I even made money in highschool doing house calls fixing people's computers.

It was about an hour or two, most of which was spent drinking tea with a random family's dad. I'd back up their data, reinstall windows, replace IE with firefox and a decent free antivirus. The computer would go from being a nightmare to being a joy to use.

In that time there were definitely more dangers looming, they would accumulate search bars and other adwares and trojans and such. There wasn't much value to be won from PC's then so having a virus would usually not affect their lives much. It would be common to get an email from your provider that they'd disable your connection if you didn't remove the DDoS bot from your machines.

Windows has had problems with desktop icons causing slowness for years. In fact, back in Windows 95 it was notable how moving the entire contents of the desktop into a folder on the desktop really sped stuff up.

I always assumed it was the overhead of loading every icon (there is substantial overhead in loading icons - in many cases requiring many disk seeks per icon). There are also a lot of shell extensions that get involved in the process for thumbnailing documents (very expensive for some document types), and determining status for shortcuts and offline files (which might involve network requests).

Overall, icons on windows are just slow. Avoid them.

Anecdotally in a certain Chrome version somewhere in the past years I've noticed something like this. The first 2 characters in my omnibox caused a terrible slowdown. So likely the history used for autocomplete kept growing or there was no sane index on the data.

Clearing my history fixed it to be _instantly_ again (even with history of a few days) and it took a few weeks to be very slow again.

So yes, I'd say its very likely that some of our assumptions might be false around such matters :)

luckily this was fixed sometime, but unfortunately this seems to coincide with autocomplete of Chrome not showing literally anything anymore.

All browsers seem to slow down with an old profile.

I suspect it's because all the unit and regression tests are run with fresh profiles, and nobody tests performance with a crufty 10 year old profile thats been through a lot of file format migrations, with highly fragmented indexes etc.

Yeah this is likely. Not sure about other browsers but I haven't noticed any of such issues myself anymore. And hey, if it ain't broke... It would be a nice for browsermakers to implement such a testsuite tho, but until then its just too easy to just clear data. Average user has all data synced to their respective cloud accounts anyway or don't care enough.

I believe that modern web browsers limit your history to 3 months, so it's almost like you never have a profile older than 3 months :)

I got quite upset when three years of browser history were wiped out by an update. A Firefox update, of all things! I still can't find the setting to restore the old behaviour.

I've never experienced this.

I just checked (in Firefox) my history panel, sorted by date... Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, This Month, a named month for the prior 5, and Older than 6 months.

And some of the randomly sampled stuff in that giant last category is quite old.

If the slowdown is sufficiently bad and it's happening on Windows then you can always record an ETW trace (https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9025467) and share it with me. My DMs are open: https://twitter.com/brucedawson0xb I've resolved a few Chrome performance issues due to strangers on the internet sharing ETW traces with me, and analyzing those traces is actually my day job.

Sorry for the late response. This was on Windows yes but it must've been fixed by now as I very rarely reset profiles and haven't experienced this since. I'll keep your offer in the back of my head tho, thanks!

I've noticed it started taking a long time to download files, they'd "download" to 100%, then stall. Moving all my "Downloads" folder into an "Old Downloads" folder fixed the problem. I suspect there was a quadratic algorithm at play.

Yes. At previous job where we were making a desktop Win32 application we experienced this. Our automatic pipeline is: Build server compiles all the .EXEs and .DLLs, creates an .EXE installer and sends it for testing. Test agent grabs the installer, installs the product and runs various test scenarios (pokes buttons, menu items, etc). One of those scenarios is HTML help (.CHM file) displayed inside Windows built-in help viewer that started to time-out. The solution was to go to Control Panel, Internet options, Clear Cookies. Also the product's check-for-updates-in-background feature on this machine was very slow because cookies. Both features are using Windows' (or IE's) high level HTTP library containing functions such as fetch-this-url-and-figure-out-TLS-and-redirects-automatigally.

> Would I have faster browser experience if I deleted some bookmarks, or if I deleted my browsing history?

In some ways, probably.

Using the "Forget about this site" command in Firefox will generally be quite slow and cause high CPU usage for ten seconds or more.

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