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In the past 20 years, desktop computers have exploded in computational power, but I feel that the desktop experience has been stagnating at best, and actually gotten slower in some places. What are the key reasons for that?
I'll give an example of what I mean:
I run Linux. One of the most important programs in my everyday work is Eclipse. I have used it more or less daily for more than 10 years now.
10 years ago, my workstation (running SuSE Linux Enterprise) had roughly these specifications:
- Athlon Thunderbird single-core processor clocked at around 2.2 GHz
- 1 GB DDR1 SDRAM
- Harddisk with 7200 RPM
- Some low-end GPU
Today, I have these specs:
- (Quad)Core i5 @ 4x2.0 GHz
- 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM
- SSD
- Radeon HD 4250
According to the specs, each of these components are between 2 and 20 times faster than what I had 10 years ago, and that's not even counting the software performance improvements such as:
- OS scheduling advancements
- GPU driver improvements
- JVM performance improvements
- ...
To summarize it, I would expect that most operations in a desktop program such as Eclipse would be several times faster than they used to be.
Actually, I am observing the following:
- Eclipse takes around 15 seconds to start, just like it did 10 years ago (I have never seen it start faster than 5 seconds on any machine, even on high-end Macs)
- Interaction with the GUI is almost as sluggish as it used to be
- Only the most basic programs (text editor, terminal) start "instantly". The same is true on any other machine I've ever seen. Eclipse, LibreOffice, Photoshop always display a splash screen and make you wait for seconds before being ready
- Computers take roughly as long to boot from flipping the "On" switch to the desktop being fully ready as they used to (exception: Macs, they are quite a bit faster)
What is the real problem here? Is it possible that software bloat has eaten up all the hardware and software performance advancements in the past 10 years? Or is there one crucial hardware component that's slowing everything down? Does anyone have an "instant-ready" experience on their desktop (without the apps being simply "backgrounded" such as OS X does of course)?
ollermax
Posted 2014-01-16T11:04:26.613
Reputation: 51
1As an experiment, you could try installing the same version of Eclipse (and corresponding JVM) as you used 10 years ago on your modern computer and see how it compares. – nitro2k01 – 2014-01-16T12:25:19.763
1Hint: do your testing with something not written or relying on java. instead test against something running native binary code. java is slow, for reasons that have little to do with hardware. Visual studio loads for me inside 10 seconds, but on the same machine eclipse takes 20-30, or longer. – Frank Thomas – 2014-01-16T12:58:58.647