Machine Lust

an editorial rant cast as sort of an antipattern...

Problem:

Your computer is sluggish.

Context:

You are running the latest version of your favorite browser, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, or programming environment.

Forces:

The disk grinds; you are paging or swapping every time you hit a key or move the mouse. The mouse can't keep up and windows take a long time to shut down. You are losing patience with the computer.

You avoid opening more than one application at once.

You take a coffee break whenever you auto-format your document using the latest wordprocessor.

Large gaping areas of the screen don't update when you move a window around. It causes you to fume.

Typical Solution:

Upgrade your memory.

Very Common Solution:

Upgrade your system to a faster beefy system. Choose something with the fastest clock speed you can find. Make sure that there is an upgrade path to a faster system. Throw down the extra bucks for at least 24 meg of RAM (for wordprocessing/web browsing).

Resulting Problem:

You ignore the fact that software in general is bloated and slow --- because we have allowed it to get that way.

We suffer from Machine Lust. We compare systems with our friends. We wait for the 200Mhz Pentium (because to buy anything slower would be a rip-off). We never complain that a software package is too big or too slow --- we just don't have a powerful enough machine to run it.

Sure, we can use the larger faster machines. But, have we lost focus on well-written, fast software?

Some time ago, I was perusing some legacy code that I had to wrap with objects. It ran on an HP9000/750 workstation with 128 MB of RAM. The machine was getting bogged down, lots of swapping and paging. People wondered why. Every process allocated 600KB of RAM for communication. Why? Because memory is cheap.

--- ToddCoram

The text above was written in July 1996. While it's a shame to prod an OldPage (I've just made revision 2), I'm wondering whether I've made a mistake in upgrading this 400MHz/192meg machine to a more recent version of a certain GUI. NothingChanges?. (June 17, 2003)

This phenomenon seems to have died down somewhat, hasn't it? For most purposes, CPUs have been more or less fast enough for a while, it seems (with Linux, anyway), and for the things that chew up hours of cpu time, a new cpu that's 2x faster isn't really tempting because it wouldn't really be good enough, I want 1000x faster for that case. :-) (May 17 2004)