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Comment by properparity | Hacker News Reader

There's several GB/s of bandwidth from disk to screen these days, so unless you're processing several GB of data you have no excuse for anything in your programs to take more than a second.

It's an insult really, such incredible waste of all the potential processing power we all have.

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They don't need an excuse. They just spend their time adding more features instead of speeding things up. And all the users flock to their tool over yours because the extra feature saved them hours in their process while your performance optimization saved seconds but took the same dev time.

With how much asset sizes have also grown... this isn't that unlikely, is it? A 4k screen that is refreshing at 60hz is pushing close to that in pixels than you'd think. Granted, you probably aren't changing every pixel every refresh, but the point is that there is a lot of data that goes into your screen.

Even just considering data, this is probably more true than you'd realize. Probably have thumbnails for the covers/titles. Then there is the sheer volume of media. And heaven help you it your computer is still trying to index a TB or so drive.

Just check how much ram your email program is using someday. Especially if you are hoping to keep an index of all email ever locally so that you can get rapid searches. The tricks that work for smaller mail boxes start to struggle with folks that insist on keeping every email over decades.

Could it be better? Almost certainly yes. Unfortunately, without taking deliberate effort to do less, I don't see it happening.

The actual data that generates those pixels is likely much smaller than the pixels themselves, at least for anything hardware accelerated

And your boss will insist that it doesn’t matter, if optimization takes more than a day to do.

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