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Can "Page's Law" Be Broken?
theodp writes "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."
Can "Page's Law" Be Broken?
I think it gets broken all the time. At least in my world. Look at Firefox 3 vs 2. Seems to be a marked improvement in speed to me.
And as far as web application containers go, most of them seem to get faster and better at serving up pages. No, they may not be "twice as fast on twice as fast hardware" but I don't think they are twice as slow every three months.
I'm certain it happens all the time, you just don't notice that ancient products like VI, Emacs, Lisp interpreters, etc stay pretty damn nimble as hardware takes off into the next century. People just can't notice an increase in speed when you're waiting on I/O like the user.
My work here is dung.
While I like the idea of being as succinct and efficient as possible with your code, at what point does it become fruitless?
Obviously, if you're testing your code on a "new" workstation and it's sluggish, you'll find ways to make it work better. But if it works well? What boss is going to pay you to work on a project for no real benefit other than to point out it is very efficient?
You just get an app which uses 100k of RAM and 32gb of filesystem buffer.
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All he has done is put numbers into Wirth's law.
I remembered this as "software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster", but Wikipedia has a slightly different wording: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
In fact, that article also cites a version called "Gates's Law", including the 50% reduction in speed every 18 months.
K.
I'd suspect that Google probably will. Not because of any OMG special Google Genius(tm), but because of simple economics.
Google's apps are largely web based. They run on Google's servers and communicate through Google's pipes. Since Google pays for every server side cycle, and every byte sent back and forth, they have an obvious incentive to economize. Since Google runs homogenous services on a vast scale, even tiny economies end up being worth a lot of money.
Compare this to the usual client application model: Even if the scale is equivalent, the maker of the software doesn't pay for the computational resources. Their only pressure is indirect(i.e. customers who don't buy because their machines don't meet spec, or customers who get pissed off because performance sucks). They thus have a far smaller incentive to watch their resource consumption.
The client side might still be subject to bloat, since Google doesn't pay for those cycles; but I suspect competitive pressure, and the uneven javascript landscape, will have an effect here as well. If you are trying to sell the virtues of webapps, your apps are (despite the latency inherent in web communication) going to have to exhibit adequate responsiveness under suboptimal conditions(i.e. IE 6, cellphones, cellphones running IE 6), which provides the built in "develop for resource constrained systems" pressure.
The problem there is that there gets to a point where the user just won't notice "stellar" speeds. Take a video game for instance. Anything past ~70 fps is really unnoticeable by the average human eye. If you design the game to run at 70 fps for a slow and memory constrained machine, the user won't really notice his quad-SLI or whatever vacuum cleaner box being any better. And you've sacrificed a lot in visual quality.
Make developers target a slow and memory constrained platform. Then you get stellar performance when it runs on the big machines.
Hardly. Have you never heard of space-time tradeoffs? ie, the most common compromise one has to make when selecting an algorithm for solving a problem? If you assume you have a highly constrained system, then you'll select an algorithm which will work within those constraints. That probably means selecting for space over time. Conversely, if you know you're working on a machine with multiple gigabytes of memory, you'll do the exact opposite.
In short: there's *nothing wrong with using resources at your disposal*. If your machine has lots of memory, and you can get better performance by building a large, in-memory cache, then by all means, do it! This is *not* the same as "bloat". It's selecting the right algorithm given your target execution environment.
Herb Grosch said it in the 1960's: Anything the hardware boys come up with, the software boys will piss away.
RAM is cheap these days.
Unless you would need to add RAM to millions of deployed devices. For example, the Nintendo DS has 4 MB of RAM and less than 1 MB of VRAM, and it broke 100 million in the first quarter of 2009. Only one DS game came with a RAM expansion card.
Anything past ~70 fps is really unnoticeable by the average human eye.
I disagree. If you can render the average scene at 300 fps, you can:
If you design the game to run at 70 fps for a slow and memory constrained machine [...] you've sacrificed a lot in visual quality.
A well-engineered game will have (or be able to generate) meshes and textures at high and low detail for close-up and distant objects respectively. On high-spec PCs, you can use the high-detail assets farther from the camera; on the slow and memory-constrained PCs that your potential customers already own, they get the low-detail assets but can still enjoy the game.
Do you remember Moore because of his law or because he co-founded Intel?
KDE4 is ~30% faster than KDE3, mainly because of the Qt4 vs. Qt3 improvements and vast redesign of the KDE itself...
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"Page's law" is simply a restatement of May's law:
"Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law".
David May is a British Computer scientist who was the lead architect for the Transputer. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
and page 20 of:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/iee.pdf
The transcript leaves out a few things from the video, the main one being that Brin gives a list of applications he has specifically in mind: gmail, chrome, and Native Client. Of these, only gmail is a javascript application. Chrome doesn't run in a browser, Chrome is a browser. And Native Client is an attempt to get out of the very situation you're complaining about, where web-based apps have to be written in javascript. NativeClient (NaCl) is a browser plugin that allows native x86 code to run in a browser. If you read the paper on NaCl I linked to above, the emphasis on security is impressive. They clearly understand what a disaster things like ActiveX have been in terms of security, and they're serious about making it safe with all kinds of fancy techniques.
A couple of other observations:
They're not kidding about making performance a priority, it's not a new priority for them, and they seem to be doing well at it. When I first tried the Google Docs spreadsheet, its performance was completely unacceptable. A year or so later, it was mentioned on Slashdot again. I was all set to make a snarky post about its poor perfomance, but then I stopped and decided to try it again to see if the performance was still as bas as I remembered. It was much better, so I posted on Slashdot to say so. I then got an email from one of the developers working on Google Docs to say he was glad I'd noticed the improvement, because it had been their main priority recently.
In the video, Brin refers to "Page's law" as the "inverse of Moore's law." I would actually say it's not so much an inverse of it as a corollary of it. Developers are always going to be as sloppy as they can get away with being, and they're always going to prefer to work with languages and APIs that give them the maximum amount of abstraction, platform-independence, and expressiveness. Software houses are always going to market proprietary software based on features (which the user can read about before making a decision to buy), not on performance (which the user can't test until he's paid for the software and tried it out on his own machine). Therefore they're always going to write software that performs as badly as they can get away with. That means that if Moore's law improves hardware performance by a factor of x over a certain period of time, software developers are just naturally going to write software that performs worse by a factor of x over that same period of time.
The really scary thing about browser-based apps, in my opinion, is that they represent a huge threat to open-source software, exactly at the moment when the OSS software stack is starting to be pretty comprehensive, mature, and usable. If you look at the web apps out there, essentially all of them are under proprietary licenses, and nearly all of them are impossible to run without a server running the completely closed-source server-side code. Although Google generally seems pretty friendly toward OSS, I don't really want to have to rely on their good intentions. They are, after all, a publicly traded company, whose only reason for existing is to maximize returns for their shareholders. From this perspective, NaCl is actually pretty scary. The default with javascript is that at least you get to see the source code of the client-side software, even if it's under a proprietary license; I think it's only natural for me to demand this if my web browser is going to run random code off of some stranger's web site. With NaCl, the default will be that all I ever get to see is the object code of the program. This is even worse than java applets; java is actually relatively easy to disassemble into fairly readable source code. (And in any case, java applets never caught on.)
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