Bloat - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

Windows 3.1 startup speed

Out of boredom, I installed MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 on my machine a few days ago — yeah, I was inspired by the Hot Dog Stand comments in this post. Check it out here. Don't be scared, it was just a virtual machine! Anyway, this was fun because it reminded me of something. Back in 1994, my father bought a Pentium 60Mhz. After ordering it, we imagined how fast it could be compared to our older machine, a 386DX 40Mhz. Based on magazine reviews of those days, we supposed that Windows 3.1 could start in 1 or 2 seconds. But what a disappointment when we got the machine. It certainly was faster than the 386, but it took many more seconds to start Windows. Now, trying this same thing on the Macbook Pro, Windows 3.1 actually starts in less than 1 second. Finally, after almost 15 years, our thoughts have become true!

January 14, 2009 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bloat">bloat</a>, <a href="/tags/windows">windows</a>
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Software bloat, 2

A long while ago — just before buying the MacBook Pro — I already complained about software bloat. A year and two months later, it is time to complain again. I am thinking on renewing my MacBook Pro assuming I can sell this one for a good price. The reasons for this are to get slightly better hardware (more disk, better GPU and maybe 4GB of RAM) and software updates. The problem is: if I am able to find a buyer, I will be left without a computer for some days, and that's not a good scenario. I certainly don't want to order the new one without being certain that I will be paid enough for the current one. So yesterday I started assembling some old components I had lying around aiming at having an old but functional computer to work with. But today I realized that I also had the PlayStation 3 with Fedora 8 already installed, and that it'd be enough to use as a desktop for a week or so. I had trimmed down the installation to the bare minimum so that it'd boot as fast as possible and to leave free resources for testing Cell-related stuff. But if I wanted to use the PS3 as a desktop, I needed, for example, GNOME. Ew. Doing a yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment" took quite a while, and not because of the network connection. But even if we leave that aside, starting the environment was painful. Really painful. And Mono was not there, at all! It is amazing how unusable the desktop is with "only" 256MB of RAM; the machine is constantly going to swap, and the disk being slow does not help either. I still remember the days when 256MB was a lot, and desktop machines were snappy enough with only half of that, or even less. OK, so GNOME is a lot for 256MB of RAM. I am now writing this from the PS3 itself running WindowMaker. Which unfortunately does not solve all the problems — and the biggest one is that it is not a desktop environment. Firefox also requires lots of resources to start, and doing something else in the background still makes the machine use swap. (Note that I have disabled almost all of the system services enabled by default in Fedora, including SELinux.) If I finally sell my MBP, this will certainly be enough for a few days... but it's a pity to see how unusable it is. (Yeah, by today's standards, the PS3 is extremely short on RAM, I know, but GNOME used to run quite well with this amount of RAM just a few years ago.)

February 28, 2008 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bloat">bloat</a>, <a href="/tags/gnome">gnome</a>, <a href="/tags/ps3">ps3</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Software bloat

A bit more than three years ago, I renewed my main machine and bought an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB of RAM and a 80GB hard disk. The speed boost I noticed in games, builds and the overall system usage was incredible — I was coming from a Pentium II 233 with 384MB of RAM. With the change, I was finally able to switch from plain window managers to desktop environments (alternating KDE and GNOME from time to time) and still keep a usable machine. I was also able to play the games of that era at high resolutions. And, what benefited me more, the build times of packages and NetBSD itself were cut by more than a half. For example, it previously needed between 6 to 7 hours to do a full NetBSD release build and, after the switch, it barely took 2. On the pkgsrc side, building some packages was almost instantaneous because the machine processed both the infrastructure and the source builds like crazy. But time passes and nowadays the machine feels extremely sluggish. And you know that hardware does not degrade like this so it's easy to conclude it's software's fault. (Thank God I've done some upgrades on the hardware, like doubling the memory, replacing the video card and adding a faster hard disk.) I'm currently running Kubuntu 6.10 and KDE is desperately slow in some situations; of course GNOME has its critical scenarios too. (Well... it is not that slow, but responsiveness is, and that makes a big amount of the final experience.) The problem is they behaved much better in the past yet I, as a desktop user, haven't noticed any great usability improvement that is worth such speed differences. As a side note: I know the developers of both projects try their best to optimize the code — kudos to them! — but this is how I see it in my machine. Another data point, this time more objective than the previous one. Remember I mentioned NetBSD took less than 2 hours to build? Guess what. It now takes 5 to 6 hours to build a full release; it's as if I went back in time 3 years! Or take pkgsrc: the infrastructure is now very, very slow; in some packages, it takes more time than the program's build itself. I could continue this rant but... it'd drive nowhere. Please do not take it as something against NetBSD, pkgsrc and KDE in particular. I've taken these three projects to illustrate the issue because they are the ones I can compare to the software I used when I bought the machine. I'm sure all other software suffers from slowdowns. Anyway, three years seem to be too much for a machine. Sometimes I think developers should be banned fast machines because, usually, they are the ones with the fastest machines. This makes them not notice the slowdowns as much as end users do. Kind of joking.

December 9, 2006 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bloat">bloat</a>, <a href="/tags/rant">rant</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Windows 3.1 startup speed

Software bloat, 2

Software bloat

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