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.'"

slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's Javascript.

The new slashdot interface

[nu1x]

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 ?

Slashdot

[Bobfrankly1]

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.

What the h&*)) is going on here?

[rickb928]

I read about this right here in January [slashdot.org]. And February [slashdot.org].

Seriously, how many times can you recycle the same story with slightly (and I mean slightly) different nuances, but the same frakking story?

Next thing you know, I'll be reading another story on this with the angle 'women and children affected the most [google.com]'.

Slashdot is becoming the USA Today of the Internet. Isn't it time for another site upgrade?

Re:I noticed this

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:I noticed this

[cpu6502]

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.

Re:Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?

[lgw]

Wow, I've seen no input lag on VS2010 at all - and I run it in a VM which is hosted on my slow-ass laptop, so it's pretty starved for resoruces. I wonder what I'm doing right here?

Re:I noticed this

[Bourdain]

While I agree with your criticism of the parent comment regarding his lack of empiricism, if he were to change his assumption from

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?

to

Why is it Microsoft Word 97 fits into my 8 megabyte 386 laptop, and has
75%
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?

It all of a sudden holds more merit

While I'm not claiming to hunt down statistics to prove my point, I think it's safe to say there's absolutely some truth to lazy programming becoming more the norm than the exception in certain areas.

Do you really think some ratio of perceived/available functionality over ram usage has remained constant or significantly decreased?

Don't you hesitate when you're about to download an application for a simple task but the first one you find is, inexplicably, 100 megabtyes, compressed, whereas the 2nd one you find (and download) is 10 or 15? :)

I know I do