It’s not you, modern software does feel slow

Why modern software is bloated

You may have felt it. From chatting apps such Teams or discord, to browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and even Gaming. Software feels sluggish and slow even on most beefy hardware.

While hardware has gotten better, Software has gotten somehow slower. I explore why I think this is in this post.

ICQ vs Teams

While it might not be a fair comparison, I can’t help but compare the basic chatting feature of ICQ from 20 years ago to Microsoft Teams today. True, Teams has more features and secure by default, but the basic chatting feature and responsiveness and performance goes to ICQ.

I still remember running ICQ on my intel 90 MHz (yes M not G) 1 core 64 MB RAM, Windows 95 and it instantly starts up, and chat just works.

Teams on the other hand takes seconds to sometimes minutes to start and hangs often on my 64GB Intel 3.0GHz 16 Core. I think you may relate this to most modern software.

Netscape vs Chrome

If you double click on your browser icon today to run it, I can guarantee that you are conditioned to wait few seconds for it to spin up. This is now considered the norm.

This isn’t how it used to be.

If you grew up in the 90s early 2000s, and used Netscape or even Internet Explorer 6, you would know that browsers start instantly.

There was another even faster alternative back then called Crazy Browser which supported tabs.

Granted loading speed depended on your Internet and the page you were loading. But assets too were cheaper back then.

Why classic software felt faster?

Software in the 90s and early 2000s were developed under highly constrained environment and as a result it was forced to produce efficient programs.

If there was a memory leak, you will notice it immediately or the process will run out of memory, sometimes it won’t even start, forcing you to fix it. You couldn't afford a memory leak.

If there was a high CPU usage your program would freeze forcing you to rewrite to use less cpu if possible or think outside the box to work within the constraints.

Writing was expensive, there was only HDD and floppy, so the programmer calling write() of fsync() would immediately feel the cost. So you would only call write when you need it. Same story for reads.

Storage used to be scarce, so programmers would do everything to make the footprint of the program as small as possible. Smaller binary = faster loading.

Can we say the same for modern software?

Modern Development

I might be wrong, but I think most bloat in modern apps stems from the development on high-end machines, which masks inefficiencies in code.

Sadly modern IDEs and dev tooling require top-end dev machines as they too use a lot of resources.

It’s a double bind.

With abundant memory and compute in modern hardware the inefficiency is masked. Causing bad code to be shipped and eventually encountered under stress often in production.

If you wrote inefficient code on old hardware, your program might not run at all, forcing you to revise, troubleshoot, finesse and fix. That is because of the limited resources.

I sometimes wonder how efficient modern apps would be if they were developed under similar constraints, it would force us to favor efficiency in coding. Memory leaks/high cpu usage that would have otherwise gone undetected because of resource abundance would have been flagged during dev.

Of course, I'm not advocating not using modern hardware, on the contrary I think if we relearned how to be efficient we could take full advantage of modern hardware. Moreover, a bump in resource requirements for software may be necessary to unlock certain features, but I don’t think we have a clear grasp on that line.

Perhaps we can develop on modern hardware but we dedicate running tests on low-end devices as part of the development cycle.

I will leave you with a clip of a Power Point 2003 running on 300 MHz Pentium 2.