Comment by tmpz22
10 days ago
Low powered android devices are a thing. Networks outside of Metro US, EU, and parts of Asia, are also a thing.
Check out google maps there’s more to the world than your open office.
10 days ago
Low powered android devices are a thing. Networks outside of Metro US, EU, and parts of Asia, are also a thing.
Check out google maps there’s more to the world than your open office.
His point isn't "network/hardware is fast, so let's be inefficient": it is the opposite. "network/hardware is fast, so why is the page still slow?". On lower powered devices and slower networks, it's even more vital to author lean applications and web pages — but "things are slow even when the hardware and network are fast" is a simple canary that we are swimming through some problems.
1. Even those low-powered Android devices are basically supercomputers
2. The Javascript bloat hurts those devices immensely. See "Performance Inequality Gap 2024" https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
How would you spec such a "lower powered" Android device?
Alex Russel did a lot of writing on this and posts yearly updates based on the state of the phone market. You can pick median, P75 or P95 device based on the analysis and set up targets based on that.
https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
I did it the simple way and bought a first item in "sort by cheapest" smartphone list. That's Alcatel 1, and it's extremely underpowered. It's maybe a bit overkill, but if something runs on that device, it will run amazing on anything else.
Hmm....that's a cool writeup but not really what I was looking for. Anyway, let's take the phone configuration he mentions:
"The A51 featured eight slow cores (4x2.3 GHz Cortex-A73 and 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53) on a 10nm process"
Looking at Wikipedia, it also has at least 4 GB of RAM and comes with 4G Internet.
The Alcatel 1 also seems to have at least a 1 GHz CPU and at least a gigabyte of RAM.
I also had a look at the Samsung Galaxy Watch. Lowest spec I could find was 1 GHz dual core + 768MB RAM (bluetooth), 1.5 GB (LTE).
The machine I was doing the web-based Postscript rendering on was a PowerMac G3. Single core 32 bit processor running at 266 MHz and and with 192MB of RAM. Connection was early DSL, 768 KB down, I think 128 KB up.
I did not do any heroic optimizations, it was fast "as-is".
So I think my point stands that modern computers, including low end Smartphones and watches are incredibly powerful and fast, including the networks.
If your tech stack manages to bring that hardware to its knees for basic UI rendering, and requires a lot of optimization effort to run barely reasonably, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your tech stack.
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