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February 08, 2005
Avoid performance anxiety
Reading Peter Seebach's article, "Where does all the processing speed go?" I notice both the irony in the author pointing out, "I've talked about some of the worst offenders this month: applications that require processors to do extra work that isn't really useful to the user," then having the site posting the article try to open a popup window to show me some sort of ad, and also the observation that most people are getting bogged down using things I try to avoid: word processors and systems like Windows, where as soon as you get an IP address you need to start running virus scanning software.
At the end Peter suggests I "Launch a few applications simultaneously and time their start-ups." Firefox is already running, but it did take a couple seconds to start. Thunderbird's about the same. Booting the whole system took a while, with the slowest service to start being the PPPoE connection to my provider, though getting Gnome going is long as well. Maybe 3 minutes for the whole thing, I don't know. It still takes too long to get the system going, that's true.
Yet the apps I use once things are actually running usually start quickly and remain quite responsive. Bash, vim, various tools like sed, grep, and find are all quick enough that I don't notice performance problems unless rlogin'd to a slow machine over a bunch of hops. Even ssh seems mostly okay with even a 512/128Kb connection and a short network path.
In the end, "Program complexity is probably the biggest culprit when your supposedly speedy processor still runs slow." The UNIX/Linux metaphor, a large box of specialized tools, leads naturally to less user-perceived bloat since you string together a bunch of small, well adapted tools for each task. In other words, the main reason you don't perceive the bloat is that it's already in your past, having consisted of you spending a long time learning about UNIX so you naturally reach for the write tool, avoiding performance anxiety.
The more you use software tools, the more sense it makes to learn to use the right ones. Peter Seebach published his article last Wednesday, but he remarks increased processing power hasn't led necessarily to a more responsive user experience. Hasn't necessarily, but definitely can as long as you sidestep the bloatware and use the right tool for each job.
Posted by Mark at February 8, 2005 06:14 AM