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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started. It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load."

Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.

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Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.

Yes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete, log off, then mash space to cancel the logoff. Kills the security software while leaving the rest of the system running. (Windows provides APIs to prevent this, but nobody writing "security" software uses them: in the Age of AI, I expect this to get even worse.

Not only do they forbid devs to use Linux on their dev machines, they then proceed with cb.exe etc. Nothing shows how they value your time quiet as much as these artificial slowdowns they love to introduce. (Along with gigantic privacy issues, as it allows the employer to essentially look at a live feed of your desktop whenever they want)

I could understand it if your device needed special access (VPN to prod etc), but you usually can't do that either from the dev machines - and need to first connect to a virtual machine (via browser or rdp) to be able to do that...

Well, we use Linux dev machines but IT has loaded them up with enough panopticon software that several times a week for an hour or so I can not get enough CPU or resident RAM to do productive work. But at least there are no forced system reboots at inconvenient times during the work day.

At a previous job they offered Linux laptops (yay!), but...

- umask was not 022, so installing pretty much anything with `sudo make install` would fail, as would some software.

- Running nmap caused an alert to phone home to IT, who would nag me on slack.

- Opening well-known ports to my LAN (like 22) caused an alert to IT.

- An "agent" program ran constantly, often using 100% of a CPU. The system overall had about 45 minutes of battery life.

- Various system settings were overridden by a sysctl.d/ file that was regenerated by the agent at boot. Fortunately I know how ASCII sorting works and could produce a file that overrode the overrides.

- Various capabilities (CAP_...) were disabled for my sudoer user.

It wasn't that bad, and IT was helpful, but it was a persistent annoyance. Maybe what happened is somebody googled "how to harden Linux" and then just made everything on the first page of results company policy.

At my work they would also disable ptrace in the kernel and require you to explain why need it

It's clear to me that the intent with this 30-second timeout was that it's better for you to have a possibly half-broken but at least somehow usable desktop than be stuck with the loading screen forever, having to boot into a different OS to try to fix your main one.

> showing the user environment before the software was fully started.

and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc).

And this is the so-called responsive design...

What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?

> Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner!

Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.

Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app took less than 1 second, or how easy Delphi apps were to create.

It's honestly very sad.

Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy.

Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference.

Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.

I suppose you are right. I worked with MFC/C++ and COM and it was horrible. Delphi and C++ Builder things were nicer to use but fell by the wayside, particularly after Borland lost their focus and didn't bother supporting VCL correctly in themes and also had major issues with their C++ compiler. They suffered a brain drain.

I remember Windows Explorer opening swiftly back in the day (fileman even faster - https://github.com/microsoft/winfile now archived sadly) and today's Explorer experience drives me insane as to how slow it is. I have even disabled most linked-in menu items as the evaluation of these makes Explorer take even longer to load; I don't see why it can't be less than 1 second.

Anyway, I do recall Netscape taking a long time to load but then I did only have a 486 DX2 66MHz and 64MB of RAM.... The disk churning did take a long time, now you remind me...

I think using wxWidgets on Windows and Mac was quite nice when I did that (with wxFormBuilder); C++ development on Windows using native toolkits is foreign to me today as it all looks a mess from Microsoft unless I have misunderstood.

In any case, I can't see why programs are so sluggish and slow these days. I don't understand why colossal JS toolkits are needed for websites and why the average website size has grown significantly. It's like people have forgotten how to write good speedy software.

Well, today I spent a lot of time waiting for some slow software that I wrote and maintain, a program that helps ship large desktop apps that use JVM or Electron. It can do native apps too but nearly nobody writes those. So I guess I both feel and create your pain in several directions.

Why is my software slow? Partly because the task is inherently intensive. Partly because I use an old Intel MacBook that throttles itself like crazy after too much CPU load is applied. Partly because I'm testing on Windows which has very slow file I/O and so any app that does lots of file I/O suffers. And partly because it's a JVM app which doesn't use any startup time optimizations.

But mostly it's because nobody seems to care. People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them. Why don't I fix it anyway? Because my time is super limited and there's always a higher priority. Bug fixes come first, features second, optimizations last. They just don't matter. Also: optimizations that increase the risk of bugs are a bad idea, because people forgive poor performance but not bugs, so even doing an optimization at all can be a bad idea.

Over the years hardware gave us much better performance and we chose to spend all of it on things like features, reducing the bug count, upping complexity (especially visual), simplifying deployment, portability, running software over the network, thin laptops and other nice things that we didn't have on Windows 98. Maybe AI will reduce the cost of software enough that performance becomes more of a priority, but probably not. We'll just spend it all on more features and bug fixes.

> People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them.

which is fine, and you are doing the absolutely correct thing regarding fixing what's being complained about.

But the complaints i keep hearing (and having myself) is that most apps are quite slow, and has been increasingly growing slower over time as updates arrives - mobile phones in particular.

I think this reflects a shift towards all software depending on a remote database, more than some change in programmer attitudes or bad software in general.

Win 9x era software relied entirely on files for sharing, and there was no real notion of conflict resolution or collaboration beyond that. If you were lucky the program would hold a Windows file lock on a shared drive exported over a LAN using SMB and so anyone else who tried to edit a file whilst you'd gone to lunch would get a locking error. Reference data was updated every couple of years when you bought a new version of the app.

This was unworkable for anything but the simplest and tiniest of apps, hence the continued popularity of mainframe terminals well into this era. And the meaning of "app" was different: it almost always meant productivity app on Win 9x, whereas today it almost always means a frontend to a business service.

Performance of apps over the network can be astoundingly great when some care is taken, but it will never be as snappy as something that's running purely locally, written in C++ and which doesn't care about portability, bug count or feature velocity.

There are ways to make things faster and win back some of that performance, in particular with better DALs on the server side, but we can't go backwards to the Win 9x way of doing things.

DAL == data access layer

My benchmark is irfanview. I think I started using it on XP and you got to enjoy the speed from the install (3 clicks and where you'd expect a loading bar you get a "launch or close wizard").

> Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy.

I disagree that those apps were dog slow at the time. They were fairly responsive, in my experience. It's true that loading took longer (thanks to not having SSDs yet), but once the app was up it was fast. Today many apps are slow because software companies don't care about the user experience, they just put out slop that is barely good enough to buy.

> Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow.

People underestimate how slow the network is, and put a network between the app and its logic to make the app itself a thin HTTP client and "application" a mess of networked servers in the cloud.

The network is your enemy, but people treat it like reading and writing to disk because it happens to be faster at their desk when they test.

I think all developers should test against a Raspberry Pi 3 for running their software (100mbps network link) just to concentrate on making it smaller and faster. This would eradicate the colossal JS libraries that have become the modern equivalent of many DLLs.

Modern iterations of the Pi have 1000Mbit but your statement has an even broader hole based on the context.

Latency.

The issue the parent mentions is one of latency, if you’re in the EU and your application server is in us-east-1 then you’re likely staring at a RTT of 200ms.

The Pi under your desk from NY? 30ms- even less if its a local test harness running in docker on your laptop.

It is really amazing how big gui flagship apps like office suite or adobe suite seem slower than they did in 2001. And really they don’t do anything different than these old tools maybe a few extra functions (like content aware fill in ps) but the bread and butter is largely the same. So why is it so slow?

It is almost like they realized users are happy to wait 30-60 seconds for an app to open in 2001 and kept that expectation even as the task remained the same and computers got an order of magnitude more powerful in that time.

When I want to make old devs cry I send them this link[1]:

https://forum.dlang.org/

I know it's very simple, I know there isn't a lot of media (and definitely no tracking or ads), but it shows what could be possible on the internet. It's just that nobody cares.

[1] Yes, Hacker News is also quite good in terms of loading speed.

Private torrent trackers are generally fast too. My pet peeves is when news websites are slow, because the only content you have is 90% text.

That 10% left of adware is heavy stuff

I think at the very least individual widgets should wait to be fully initialized before becoming interactable. The amount of times I've, say, tried to click on a dropdown menu entry just to have it change right under my cursor making me click on something else because the widget was actually loading data asynchronously, without giving me any notice to the fact at all, is frankly ridiculous.

It's the right thing to do to load resources asynchronously in parallel, but you shouldn't load the interface piecemeal. Even on web browsers.

I'd much rather wait for an interface to be reliable than have it interactive immediately but having to make a guess about its state.

I'd be happy to get a progress wheel, half the time it is a blank page.

There used to be a loading progress by the browser, but today, it’s when it’s done that the real loading start.

> And this is the so-called responsive design...

I’m not sure if this was meant to be a pun, but “responsive design” has nothing to do with how quickly a UI loads. It’s about adapting to different screen sizes.

Plain html could do that too. People forget the ancient knowledge.

If everything was plain HTML, the web would still be only for academics and a handful of nerds, and most of the people on HN would have to find other jobs.

Well, the plain html version of gmail (which google recently removed) works so much better and runs so much faster than the fully interactive webapp version.

I would imagine that to be the case for a lot of webapps out there.

Plain HTML does not support scrolling, why else are there so many websites with JS scrolling behaviour.

Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.

Of course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.

Then maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA

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