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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

This sort of comment has completely lost the forest for the trees.

You’re conflating scale with bloat. At large orgs the problem is that nobody is willing to step back and say “this sucks”. Trying to get this fixed involves getting 6 teams to agree upon something with no clear owner for the outcome and with everyone incentivised for not being blamed if one of the other groups tanks the effort.

> engineers should drop everything and work overtime on optimising performance

No, we’re asking for it to be taken seriously by the organisation. I work in games, and on large projects we usually have a small team (2/3 people of a team of 80-100) who are constantly working on this stuff. Their work is “subjective” improvements but often it’s just building tooling and telling other groups what they need to fix.

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I think part of the difference is that in gaming if performance sucks then there's a real community of people who push back and it will affect sales directly. In web development at least for the majority of sites (e.g. not on the level of usage of Github) usually people just stop visiting your site, so you don't see public pushback as much.

If a decent portion of your audience literally cannot even play the game because its performance is too bad or it can't run on their hardware, then that immediately affects your bottom line. And at least until recently, you couldn't really push fixes for it once the game was delivered. And so I think at least a little bit of that mindfullness for performance has carried over to the modern day, though I will say that I do think that performance optimization does seem to subjectively be getting worse even in gaming.

In web dev, while it is true that it affects your bottom line, it's a little bit less obvious. And in the eyes of most management teams that's always something that can be prioritized later since you could always update it after you shipped a feature. Also, there was very much a culture of "the browser will handle it."

Not to mention, most devs are using the hardware that is many times better than their consumers.

> If a decent portion of your audience literally cannot even play the game because its performance is too bad or it can't run on their hardware, then that immediately affects your bottom line

There is a small, but very vocal group that complain about 30 vs 60fps, and yet there are games that push for 120/240 on consumer hardware (valorant and overwatch both run at very high frame rates on very low specs). As I said, it’s about prioritising it. _Why_ it’s being prioritised doesn’t really matter.

> also there was very much a culture of “the browser will handle it”

That is very clearly still the culture.

> most devs are using the hardware that is many times better than their consumers.

My last work PC was a 32 core 4GHz machine with 256GB RAM, a 4090, and 16TB of NVMe SSD’s with 10GB fibre. Our target platform was 9GB RAM, and an 8 core 1.1GHz processor, yet we still managed (just about).

To be really clear, the performance of GitHub’s website has basically always been terrible. I don’t know why. It has bothered be forever. And it’s weird - GitHub doesn’t actually render much content. But it often takes seconds to load that tiny bit of content. I often clone entire repos locally rather than browse them on GitHub just so I don’t have to wait for their webpage.

To continue the comparison, cyberpunk can render night city in 16ms. Which makes me embarassed for GitHub that they can’t render a list of files and a static markdown readme in under a second.

I would push back on that. It used to be less terrible before they made it all SPA. Now there are all sorts of broken-caching tricks that try to do in-place reloads. I frequently see progress bars incrementing while it is attempt to do a request - while that original redraw is attempting to happen, I can frequently launch a new tab with the same link that will finish rendering before the original.

The difference is that comments like the top level reply to the top level comment here are the norm: so much making excuses and maximising developer convenience. There is not a single major discussion about anything performance or bloat where those excuses aren't trotted out, and often enough they're at the top.

Maybe some game devs talk like that behind closed doors, but don't think I ever saw it in public. Here the fig leaf usually is that "the average user doesn't care", as if they and not the most proficient users (if not developers with a clue) should be the yard stick.

With gaming the people who care the most, and know the most, will be heard by the gaming community even if the game devs try to ignore them, and most game devs know better than openly belittling that they care about details "most people wouldn't notice", or any of the stuff HN is filled with.

How about simply not making excuses anymore? Letting the criticism stand, sitting with it, letting it sink in and see what tomorrow brings? Why this need to akshually it?

And how that happens in gaming? Pretty curious now.

Frame rates are very important, so we prioritise them. That’s about it. The same “bloat” is often found in internal tooling in games. Unreal is a great example of it, nobody _really_ cared about how long packaging a build took, it got ad hoc improvements, but then epic decided to invest in it and its improved monumentally in the last 2-3 years. (Disclaimer, I worked there when nobody cared and was responsible for some of those as hoc changes)

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