Comment by maccard
4 days ago
Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber.
On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.
> Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch.
> On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional
I just launched IntelliJ (first time since reboot). Took maybe 2 seconds to the projects screen. I clicked a random project and was editing it 2 seconds after that.
I tried Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB, and tried to count the loading time. Twitter was the slowest at about 3 seconds.
I have a 4 year old laptop. If you're seeing 10 second load times for every website and 20 second launch times for every app, you have something else going on. You mentioned corporate VPN, so I suspect you might have some heavy anti-virus or corporate security scanning that's slowing your computer down more than you expect.
> heavy anti-virus or corporate security scanning that's slowing your computer down more than you expect.
Ugh, I personally witnessed this. I would wait to take my break until I knew the unavoidable, unkillable AV scans had started and would peg my CPU at 100%. I wonder how many human and energy resources are wasted checking for non-existant viruses on corp hardware.
In a previous job, I was benchmarking compile times. I came in on a Monday and everything was 10-15% slower. IT had installed carbon black on my machine over the weekend, which was clearly the culprit. I sent WPA traces to IT but apparently the sales guys said there was no overhead so that was that.
I used to think that was the worst, but then my org introduced me to pegging HDD write at 100% for half an hour at a time. My dad likes to talk about how he used to turn on the computer, then go get coffee; in my case it was more like turn on machine, go for a run, shower, check back, coffee, and finally... maybe.
Every Wednesday my PC becomes so slow it is barely usable. It is the Windows Defender scans. I tried doing a hack to put it on a lower priority but my hands are tied by IT.
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I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers.
On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load.
I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.
VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive?
Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.
Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading.
You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.
I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.
Sublime Text isn't an IDE though so comparing it to VS Code is comparing grapes and apples. VS Code is doing a lot more.
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>Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.
Do any of those do the indexing that cause the slowness? If not it's comparing apples to oranges.
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> You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.
11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 10 years ago things were exactly the same. 15 years ago, my coworkers were complaining that VS2010 was a resource hog compared to 10 years ago. My memory of loading photoshop in the early 2000’s was that it took absolutely forever and was slow as molasses on my home PC.
I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse, I think it’s always been pathetically bad.
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5 seconds is a lot for a machine with an M4 Pro, and tons of RAM and a very fast SSD.
There's native apps just as, if not more, complicated than VSCode that open faster.
The real problem is electron. There's still good, performant native software out there. We've just settled on shipping a web browser with every app instead.
There is snappy electron software out there too, to be fair. If you create a skeleton electron app it loads just fine. A perceptible delay but still quick.
The problem is when you load it and then react and all its friends, and design your software for everything to be asynchronous and develop it on a 0 latency connection over localhost with a team of 70 people where nobody is holistically considering “how long does it take from clicking the button to doing the thing I want it to do”
It's probably more so that any corporate Windows box has dozens of extra security and metrics agents interrupting and blocking every network request and file open and OS syscall installed by IT teams while the Macs have some very basic MDM profile applied.
This is exactly it. My Debian Install on older hardware than my work machine is relatively snappy. The real killer is the Windows Defender Scans once a week. 20-30% CPU usage for the entire morning because it is trying to scan some CDK.OUT directory (if I delete the directory, the scan doesn't take nearly as long).
This is my third high end workstation computer in the last 5 years and my experience has been roughly consistent with.
My corporate vpn app is a disaster on so many levels, it’s an internally developed app as opposed to Okta or anything like that.
I would likewise say that your experience is not universal, and that in many circumstances the situation is much worse. My wife is running an i5 laptop from 2020 and her work intranet is a 60 second load time. Outlook startup and sync are measured in minutes including mailbox fetching. You can say this is all not the app developers fault, but the crunch that’s installed on her machine is slowing things down by 5 or 10x and that slowdown wouldn’t be a big deal if the apps had reasonable load times in the first place.
> are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch.
I suddenly remembered some old Corel Draw version circa year 2005, which had loading screen enumerating random things it loaded and was computing until a final message "Less than a minute now...". It most often indeed lasted less than a minute to show interface :).
IMO they just don't think of "initial launch speed" as a meaningful performance stat to base their entire tech stack upon. Most of these applications and even websites, once opened, are going to be used for several hours/days/weeks before being closed by most of their users
For all the people who are doubting that applications are slow and that it must just be me - here [0] is a debugger that someone has built from the ground up that compiles, launches, attaches a debugger and hits a breakpoint in the same length of time that visual studio displays the splash screen for.
[0] https://x.com/ryanjfleury/status/1747756219404779845
That sounds like a corporate anti-virus slowing everything down to me. vscode takes a few seconds to launch for me from within WSL2, with extensions. IntelliJ on a large project takes a while I'll give you that, but just intelliJ takes only a few seconds to launch.
Vscode is actually 10 seconds, you’re right.
I have no corp antivirus or MDM on this machine, just windows 11 and windows defender.
Odd, I tested two news sides (tagesschau.de and bbc.com) and both load in 1 - 2 seconds. Airbnb in about 4 - 6 seconds though. My reddit never gets stuck, or if it does it's on all tabs because something goes wrong on their end.
How does your vscode take 20+ seconds to launch? Mine launches in 2 seconds.
All those things takes 4 seconds to launch or load on my M1. Not great, not bad.
Even 4-5 seconds is long enough for me to honestly get distracted. That is just so much time even on a single core computer from a decade ago.
On my home PC, in 4 seconds I could download 500MB, load 12GB off an SSD, perform 12 billion cycles (before pipelining ) per core (and I have 24 of them) - and yet miro still manages to bring my computer to its knees for 15 seconds just to load an empty whiteboard.
> This is on an i9
On which OS?
HOW does Slack take 20s to load for you? My huge corporate Slack takes 2.5s to cold load.
I'm so dumbfounded. Maybe non-MacOS, non-Apple silicon stuff is complete crap at that point? Maybe the complete dominance of Apple performance is understated?
I use Windows alongside my Mac Mini, and I would say they perform pretty similarly (but M-chip is definitely more power efficient).
I don't use Slack, but I don't think anything takes 20 seconds for me. Maybe XCode, but I don't use it often enough to be annoyed.
I have an i9 windows machine with 64GB ram and an M1 Mac. I’d say day to day responsiveness the Mac is heads and tails above the windows machine, although getting worse. I’m not sure if the problem is the arm electron apps are getting slower or if my machine is just aging
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Most likely the engineers at many startups only use apple computers themselves and therefore only optimize performance for those systems. It's a shame but IMO result of their incompetence and not result of some magic apple performance gains.
Yes it is and the difference isn't understated, I think everyone knows by now that Apple has run away with laptop/desktop performance. They're just leagues ahead.
It's a mix of better CPUs, better OS design (e.g. much less need for aggressive virus scanners), a faster filesystem, less corporate meddling, high end SSDs by default... a lot of things.
Qualcomm CPUs outperform Apple now, Apple was just early and had exclusivity for manufacturing 3nm at TSMC.