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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

I remember waiting almost two minutes for Netscape Navigator to start.

I bet Netscape 2.0 would startup more or less instantly on modern hardware. Modern computers are so bonkers fast that everything should be instant on them. I mean, new CPUs can do 5 billion cycles per second, per core. To have an operation take 1 second, someone wrote software so slow that the computer took billions of steps to do something. How wild is that!

Whenever you have to wait for things on modern computers, you’ve essentially been robbed.

> 5 billion cycles per second

IF everything is in the cache, there is no dependency on I/O, and cycles aren't wasted with context switching between usermode->kernel.

Unless your program is purely computational it's going to burn cycles on system calls and I/O.

Your computer can do an awful lot of syscalls and IO in 1 second.

And almost all of the network traffic and syscalls can be mitigated almost all of the time. Eg by caching, buffered IO, cutting out bloat, minifying javascript, static rendering, using lower res assets, and so on.

There’s exceptions - AI, video games, rendering and simulations work can take real time.

But other than that, modern computers should boot instantly, and apps should open instantly. Webpages should open within about 3x the server round trip time. There is very little software I’ve ever worked with that, with some effort, couldn’t be massively optimized.

I was in middle school. We called it Nutscrape. It was abysmally slow, agreed.

But it wasn't a simple piece of software, either. This sound recorder is.

And I'll let an expert chime in here, but I think we're many orders of magnitude faster now, on the hardware side.

Imagine that was probably limit on hard drive read speed

And low available RAM paired with a slow hard drive and memory swapping.

Nothing to waiting for contemporary versions of Word to collect the fonts list…

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