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0 pointsfleddr4y ago0 comments

I think it's even stronger than a habit. When you're exposed to the typical "performance" of the web and apps for a decade or so, you may have forgotten about raw performance entirely. Young people may have never experienced it at all.

I once owned a small business server with a Xeon processor, Linux installed. Just for kicks I wrote a C program that would loop over many thousands of files, read their content, sort in memory, dump into a single output file.

I ran the program and as I ran it, it was done. I kept upping the scope and load but it seems I could throw anything at it and the response time was zero, or something perceived as zero.

Meanwhile, it's 2022 and we can't even have a text editor place a character on screen without noticeable lag.

Shit performance is even ingrained in our culture. When you have a web shop with a "submit order" button, if you'd click it and would instantly say "thanks for your order", people are going to call you. They wonder if the order got through.

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kllrnohj4y ago

Shit performance is what happens when every response to optimizations or overhead is immediately answered with "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Or the always fun "profile it!" or "the runtime will optimize it" when discussing new language features and systems.

So often performance isn't just ignored, it's actively preached against. Don't question how that new runtime feature performs today or even dare to ask. No no no, go all in on whatever and hope the JIT fairy is real and fixes it. Even though it never is and never does.

There's a place for all the current tech, of course. Developer productivity can be more important at times. But it should be far more known what the tradeoffs are and rough optimization guides than there are.

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smolder4y ago

This is a tangent but there are other, arguably better ways to give the user confidence the order took place in your example. You could show the line items to them again with some indicators of completion, or show the order added to an excerpt of their order history, where perhaps they can tap/click to view line items. Something like that is a bit more convincing than just thank-you text even with the delay, IMO, though it may be tougher to pull off design-wise.

Tostino4y ago

In my SAAS app, we have a few artificial delays to ensure all "background tasks" that pop up a progress dialog take at least long enough to show that to the user.

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