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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

But OP could have more RAM, and the end user doesn't care about how clever the algorithm is. They only care that the service is offline for a week while the developer is having fun implementing their new toy algorithm.

Working on improvements like this makes a lot of sense in academia, when you are running thousands of servers, or when you need so much memory that you can't buy a big enough server. It's a nice backlog item for when there is literally nothing else to do.

I have definitely fallen into this rabbit hole myself. Solving difficult problems with clever solutions is a lot of fun! But my manager - rightfully - chastised me for it because from a business PoV it was essentially a waste of time and money. Fine for a hobby project, not so much when you are trying to run a business.

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> Working on improvements like this makes a lot of sense in academia, when you are running thousands of servers, or when you need so much memory that you can't buy a big enough server.

It also makes sense for all desktop and mobile apps, per gnyman’s point on not hitting individual limits. Also for anything that other people will be running, like libraries. Because your thing might perform marvelously in isolation on a beefy dev machine and still run like ass on every user’s somewhat underpowered computer with ten other apps competing for RAM (hello Slack).

See also: “craptop duty”[1]; how the 512K Mac reduced the competitive advantage of MS’s ruthlessly-optimized office apps but the MultiFinder, né Switcher, restored it[2].

[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/

[2] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Thanks for the links, interesting story about switcher.

And yes, hearty recommendation on the craptop.

I was discussing with a colleague a while back when he said he had to get one as he was unable to reproduce a problem on his M2 even with the 6x cpu throttling you can do in Chrome. On the old laptop he dug out of storage he managed to reproduce it instantly.

I need to check with him how easily he could fix it, one argument I have to why some optimisation is always good is that it's easier to fix things as you go along vs having to go back and try to make things better. I mean if there is one thing making it slow then it's easy, but I have a feeling it's often a mix of things and at that point you might not be able to replace the slow parts as everything else depends on them.

(I might have actually linked the wrong Switcher story. The one I remembered explained why it existence was strategic for Microsoft, but control over it was not: multitasking made memory optimization matter on a larger machine.)

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