Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals?
I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.
A large part of my friend group use discord as the primary method of communication, even in an in person context (was at a festival a few months ago with a friend, and we would send texts over discord if we got split up) so maybe its not a common use case.
It’s closed unless I get a DM on my phone and then I suffer the 2-3 minute startup/failed update process and quit it again. Not a fan of leaving their broken, resource hogging app running at all times.
It would not fail to update if installed as a user installed flatpak.
Many apps are this way now.
I'll admit that the Discord service is really good from a UX point of view.
I made a slight at Word taking like 10 seconds to start and some people came back saying it only takes 2, as if that still isn't 2s too long.
Then again, look at how Microsoft is handling slow File Explorer speeds...
Took me almost a year to get a separate laptop laptop for office and development. Their Enhanced Security prevented me from testing administrative code features and broke Visual Studios bug submission system, which Microsoft requires you to use for posting software bugs.
By the way, I can brake Windows simply by running their PowerShell utilities to configure NICs. Windows is not the stable product people think it is.
> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178
Section of the top comment says,
> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!
and the reply to it has,
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.
Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.
The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.
They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.
The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.
Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.
Tell me you don't work on game engines without telling me..
----
Modern engines are the cumulative result of hundreds of thousands of engine-programmer hours. You're not rewriting Unreal in several years, let alone multiple times in one year. Get a grip dude.
I’d be careful before telling people to “get a grip”.
I thought this post was weird for a few reasons, so I read through your resume, which perfectly explained everything. You're the author of that voxel engine I keep seeing get posted, but you have absolutely no experience in the industry, not even bushleague itch.io stuff. I wouldn't normally call someone out for any of this, but who are you to tell anybody to get grip? You don't even know what you're talking about, which is why your reply is simultaneously naive and a non-sequitur. Chill out. You have a cute toy engine, but it's nothing more than portfolio padding. Until you've actually shipped a real game from start to finish, you've got no room to act like this. A little bit more self awareness please.
That said, it's easy to throw shade from a new, blank account. Nothing to lend credibility to your statements, not even bushleague itch.io stuff, or a cute, toy engine. Give me the goods, otherwise you're just blowing smoke.
> your reply is simultaneously naive and a non-sequitur
Basis? Pretty watery rebuttal for someone so sure of themselves.
> You're not rewriting Unreal
Do you consider the Unreal engine code to be part of "your codebase"?
And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...
Sometimes the performance is really ignored.
It cost several human lifetimes if i remember correctly. Still not as bad as windows update which taking the time times wage has set the gdp of a small nation on fire every year..
We've only got a couple of game dev shops in my city, so not sure how common that is.
A senior joining when time is tight makes sense, they don’t want anyone to rock the boat, just to plug the holes.
I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.
AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.
Though in this case GitHub wasn't bearing the cost, it was gaining a profit...
Are they evaluating the shape of that line with the same goal as the stonk score? Time spent by users is an "engagement" metric, right?
>>what you mean by software houses
How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app.
The decline of Windows as a user facing product is amazing, especially as they are really good at developing things they care about. The “back of house” guts of Windows has improved alot, for example. They should just have a cartoon Bill Gates pop up like clippy and flip you the bird at this point.
It has both indexing failures and multi-day performance issues for mere kilobytes of text!
What falsehoods people believe and spread about a particular topic is an excellent way to tell what the public opinion is on something.
Consider spreading a falsehood about Boeing QA getting bonuses based on number of passed planes vs the same falsehood about Airbus. If the Boeing one spreads like wildfire, it tells you that Boeing has a terrible track record of safety and that it’s completely believable.
Back to the start menu. It should be a complete embarrassment to MSFT SWEs that people even think the start menu performance is so bad that it could be implemented in electron.
In summary: what lies spread easily is an amazing signal on public perception. The SMBC comic is dumb.
If your users are trapped due to a lack of competition then this can definitely happen.
This is true for sites that are trying to make sales. You can quantify how much a delay affects closing a sale.
For other apps, it’s less clear. During its high-growth years, MS Office had an abysmally long startup time.
Maybe this was due to MS having a locked-in base of enterprise users. But given that OpenOffice and LibreOffice effectively duplicated long startup times, I don’t think it’s just that.
You also see the Adobe suite (and also tools like GIMP) with some excruciatingly long startup times.
I think it’s very likely that startup times of office apps have very little impact on whether users will buy the software.
They often have a recognizable delay to user data input compared to local software
Then respectfully, uh, why is basically all proprietary software slow as ass?
Everybody likes to hate Telemetry, and yes, it can be abused, but that's how Mozilla (and its competitors) manage to make user's life more comfortable.
Must be nice. In my career, all working on webapps, I've seen a few leaders popping in to ask us to fix a particularly egregious performance issue if the right customers complain, but aside from those finely-targeted and limited-attention-span drives to "improve performance" it seems the answer for the past decade or so is just to assume everyone is on at least a gigabit connection, stick fingers in ears, and just keep adding more node modules. If the developers' disks get full because node_modules got too big, buy a bigger SSD and keep going. (ok that last part is slight hyperbole but I also don't think frontend devs would be deterred from their ravenous appetite for libraries by a full disk).
Maybe Google? Gmail app is 700+ MB
I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric
This has been common wisdom for decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.