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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree that the balance is shifting towards "why is this taking so long". There's ebbs and flows in that ecosystem.

But overall, I think you overestimate how much time you spend loading the website and how much time it's just sitting there, mostly idle.

And in the end, as long as it's fast enough that users don't stop using the site/webapp/program/whatever, then it's fine, imho. When it becomes too slow, the developers will be asked to improve performance. Because in the end, economics is the driver, not performance.

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As an end user, I would prefer to live in a world where I don't have to wait for software to respond. If forced to, I would also continue to use software where I do have to wait. Your argument that economics will dictate the best solution and lead to a happy balance doesn't work. It will tend towards a borderline tolerable world, where your product only has to be better than the other guy's.

This is separate from the discussion about tradeoffs between flexible design patterns and low-level performance.

He never said "happy", he said its fine. Meaning its fine that you have to live in a world where you have to wait for some software to respond, even if you would prefer not to. If you are happy in such a (horrible || ok) world is up to you.

> But overall, I think you overestimate how much time you spend loading the website and how much time it's just sitting there, mostly idle.

reading the website is productive. Waiting on it to load is not.

I'd rather have app burn a whole core whole time if it cut 1s off load time when clicking something.

I think the point would be: what if instead of using a whole core and it takes 2000ms to load because it is essentially "spinning its wheels" it would only use half a core and it takes 50ms?

2s you notice as a user. 50ms you won't. In fact even 500ms you won't notice too much but we are getting close to where optimization will be noticeable to a user.

This is a few years old, but gives a sense of how much money might be left on the table due to a slow loading web page:

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-53-of-mobile-users...

And depending on what you do, economics will let performance decide who wins. Git is probably one example. A different example, have you ever compared battery lifes of smartphones before buying one?

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