← Back to context

Comment by pronkin

1 year ago

I wouldn't say it's extremely slow. While benchmarks can be useful, they often don't align with real-world experiences. What exactly are you comparing? Is it just rendering time? Have you considered a user's workflow, which might involve navigating through several pages or objects? In reality, we've attracted many users because they find 'Notion' to be slow, and many appreciate the speed of Anytype. Based on this, I believe it's not fair to give Anytype the same rating as Notion in your diagram. Also, I would assign a higher rating to Bear and Craft; their desktop apps are faster since they are native.

There is significant room for improvement, and we're already steps ahead in this area with our native mobile clients that sync peer-to-peer. Try our Android app and see for yourself. I hope that within the next three years, we'll excel with native desktop applications as well.

The value proposition of Plume looks good; I've left my email.

Hi! If you click on the "More details" button, you'll see the following table[1].

Here's the methodology (also available on the website):

1. Loading time: Fully loads the entire text and ready to scroll.

2. Memory use after load: Memory used by the app after loading the text.

3. Scroll jump: How fast the app scrolls when dragging the scrollbar to a far position.

4. Resize: How fast the app resizes after scrolling to the middle of the text.

5. Select all: How fast the app is at multiple operations: Select all text, cut, paste, undo, redo.

6. Editing: How fast the app is at typing at the middle of the text?

7. Memory use second time: Memory usage after doing all the above operations multiple times.

8. Binary size: Binary size of the app.

9. Cross-platform: Can the app run on Windows, Linux and macOS?

I think these are very fair benchmarks. And objectively speaking, both Bear and Craft didn't perform well (well, Craft couldn't load the text since it has a limit on the amount of paragraphs it can load).

EDIT: Just noticed you signed up! Thanks for that! BTW, I did try Anytype's iOS app and it was very smooth compared to the web/Electron one.

[1] https://imgur.com/vEfV7Iq

  • Huh - it was surprising how poorly Bear fares in that benchmark given I use it regularly and find it snappy and responsive. But then I looked closer and saw you were loading War and Peace into it.

    I'll let you in on a dirty secret: Most of my documents aren't as long as war and peace. I care a lot more about "normal" document sizes and real world typing latency. Is Anytype actually slow in this case?

    • My benchmark is largely based on the "Moby Dick Workout"[1] of Jesse Grosjean. I agree with him that ANY text editor should pass these tests. And block editors are first and foremost text editors. I just decided to take it up a notch and do my tests on War and Peace.

      Another very crucial point, a good deal of software today is written with no oversight on performance at all, so you end up needing to buy the latest hardware to run apps smoothly. Why would anyone need a M3 Macbook to run a text editor fast??

      This is why I used a 2017 Macbook Air in my tests and not the M1 Pro next to it. Efficient software matters for the longevity of hardware.

      [1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/moby-dick-workout/

      2 replies →