Comment by andy_ppp
1 day ago
I do not understand this thinking at all, a parsed response into whatever rendering engine, even if extremely fast is going to be a large percentage of this 500ms page load. Diminishing it with magical thinking about pure database queries under load with no understanding of the complexity of Shopify is quite frankly ridiculous, next up you’ll be telling everyone to roll there own file sharing with rsync or something…
I know - old man yells at cloud and stuff - but some 8-bit home computers from the 80s completed their entire boot sequence in about half a second. What does a 'UI rendering engine' need to do that takes half a second on a device that's tens of thousands of times faster? Everything on modern computers should be 'instant' (some of that time may include internet latency of course, but I assume that the Shopify devs don't live on the moon).
Moorsches Law v2 (/s) states that while computers get faster, we add more layers so computers actually get slower.
Back when "WinTel" was a true duopoly, we used to call this "Gates Law".
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Not sure why people keep bringing the old (my machine x years ago was faster). Machines nowadays do way more than machines from 80s. Whether the tasks they do are useful or not is separate discussion.
Casey Muratori has a clip [0] discussing the performance differences between Visual Studio in 2004 vs. today.
Anecdotally, I’ve been playing AoE2: DE a lot recently, and have noticed it briefly stuttering / freezing during battles. My PC isn’t state of the art by any means (Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB PC4-24000, RX580 8GB), but this is an isometric RTS we’re talking about. In 2004, I was playing AoE2 (the original) on an AMD XP2000+ with maybe 1GB of RAM at most. I do not ever remember it stuttering, freezing, or in any way struggling. Prior to that, I was playing it on a Pentium III 550 MHz, and a Celeron 333 MHz. Same thing.
A great anti-example of this pattern is Factorio. It’s also an isometric top-down game, with RTS elements, but the devs are serious about performance. It’s tracking god knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of objects (they’re simulating fluid flow in pipes FFS), with a goal of 60 FPS/UPS.
Yes, computers today are doing more than computers from the 80s or 90s, but the hardware is so many orders of magnitude faster that it shouldn’t matter. Software is by and large slower, and it’s a deliberate choice, because it doesn’t have to be that way.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR4i3Ho9zZY
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Sure, and the screen in text mode was 80 x 25 chars = 2000 bytes of memory. A new phone has perhaps three million pixels, each taking 4 bytes. There's a significant difference.
And yet the GPU in your phone can run a small program for each pixel taking hundreds or even thousands of clock cycles to complete and still hit a 60Hz frame rate or more. It's not the hardware that's the problem, but the modern software Jenga tower that drives it.