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The Insidious Creep of Latency Hell
Twinbee writes "Gamers often find 'input lag' annoying, but over the years, delay has crept into many other gadgets with equally painful results. Something as simple as mobile communication or changing TV channels can suffer. Software too is far from innocent (Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?), and even the desktop itself is riddled with 'invisible' latencies which can frustrate users (take the new Launcher bar in Ubuntu 11 for example). More worryingly, Bufferbloat is a problem that plagues the internet, but has only recently hit the news. Half of the problem is that it's often difficult to pin down unless you look out for it. As Mick West pointed out: 'Players, and sometimes even designers, cannot always put into words what they feel is wrong with a particular game's controls ... Or they might not be able to tell you anything, and simply say the game sucked, without really understanding why it sucked.'"
And here I thoguht I was the only one complaining that changing channels gets slower and slower with every new receiver box.
On analog it was basically instant, less than 100ms.
First digital box took half a second. Full HD box sometimes takes a whole second or more (and it's not even deterministic anymore)
That SUCKS big time!
The N900 suffers from this, alas.
I can't comprehend why the phone app isn't in memory on boot. It's a PHONE. Instead, when the phone rings you have to wait several seconds for the phone application to load.
In contrast, my wife's new HTC Z snaps and zings along with Android, even though it's "bloaty" Java / Davlik.
I was going to read the article, but it took too long to load.
Slashdot's Javascript.
It actually drives me insane, it is markedly worse, I read less stories because of it (because I do not like the feel of the site so much).
I would bet most of the actual slashdot users feel (think ?) the same way. Why is there no mass appeal to change it back / forward in a more reasonable (i.e., simpler) direction ?
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
I had an incredibly insightful comment, but I forgot it while waiting 2ms for the comment interface to load. I remembered and forgot it again during the 10 seconds it took the preview to render.
For business development (not tools like FireFox, etc) it's not about being 'as fast as possible', but rather 'as maintainable as possible' while trying to be fast enough. When you write code to wring every clock cycle out of a CPU, the code tends to be difficult to maintain. Sometimes you need to do this, but in general you don't. People still write absolute crap in both situations of course.
I'm not buying those excuses.
Why is it Microsoft Word 97 fits into my 8 megabyte 386 laptop, and has 99% of the same functions as modern Word, plus is quick and responsive. Why can't they bring that level of efficiency for today's Word 2010?
Because they aren't trying.
Because they don't care.
Because it's easier for management to tell users, "Go buy a new computer with 8x more RAM," than to pay programmers to make the code more efficient/responsive.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"(Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?"
Really? do you even know what the hell you are talking about? OR did these two think pop into your skull and you use your meaty finger to pound out some sort of text in a vain effort to stay relevant?
Replace:
Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?
With:
Crappy programmers.
And has anyone documented a repeatable real world test for 'bufferbloat' or is this still an academic issue?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Okay, let's say it's 50%
The only personal experience I have with this is that, among many other things I do professionally, usually at any organization I'm at (as a consultant or otherwise), I'm embarrassingly the "Excel guru".
Using Excel a moderate amount, I do try to use VBA pretty sparingly given its obvious slowness compared to other methods of calculation, but on occasion, it's markedly more efficient than other designs (e.g. testing for a series of involved conditions which would otherwise process extremely slowly using a formulas, etc.)
I've found that even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 VBA execution, of identical code, is much slower than Excel 2003.
For that reason, along with the sheer inefficiency of the ribbon design in terms of responsiveness and usage of screen real estate, I keep all Office 2007 usage relegated to a VM which I rarely even need.
To further clarify the issue, I have developed a personal library of macros I use in simply navigating spreadsheets efficiently. Even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 cannot keep up with my usage of these macros and throws errors repeatedly whereas I never see such errors in Excel 2003. Keep in mind, this is on modern hardware.
My interpretation of this is that speed and efficiency were low priorities for the Office development team. Given that their interface redesign was, I believe admittedly, largely geared towards novice users, these alleged low priorities make more sense.
To appeal to your sense of empiricism, which I appreciate, please see (perhaps not of the greatest quality...)
http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=81967
http://www.excelbanter.com/showthread.php?t=137875
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78673&page=1
for what it's worth, I always disable screen refresh and calculation during a macro (except in rare circumstances when that behavior is necessary)