MoiraPrime
Norm MikotoDevs should really grab an old netbook from ebay with an atom cpu and 1-2GB of ram and see how well their new React app works on that
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】
@mikoto More like a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM.
@tk My first computer was a Pentium II 450 MHz with 384 MB of RAM. I think making it browse the modern web violates the 8th amendment of the US constitution
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
rqsd@[email protected] Why should they do that? They have no economic incentive to do so
@rq yeah maybe there should be some
Ibly 🏳️⚧️ 
LONG LIVE HERRSCHER OF SENTIENCE!@[email protected] b-but most laptops and phones come with 8 cores and 8 GB RAM anyway
And that is precisely why the performance is still the same if not worse than the software made 15 years ago
And that is precisely why the performance is still the same if not worse than the software made 15 years ago
Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd
Witch Aly 
@mikoto spoiler alrrt: bad
stilescrisis@mikoto I bought a 2GB RAM/16GB SSD Intel Atom mini-PC long ago, back when Windows 10 was new. It swapped constantly and was unusable for _any_ purpose. I tried switching it to ChromeOS and it was slightly better, but still barely usable. 2GB is just not a realistic config anymore.
@stilescrisis browser devs also need to optimize too
How an Atom PC can run XP with Office 2003 (or even Debian with Libreoffice) fine but not a modern OS is really more of a sign how bloated everything has gotten more than anything.
How an Atom PC can run XP with Office 2003 (or even Debian with Libreoffice) fine but not a modern OS is really more of a sign how bloated everything has gotten more than anything.
@mikoto Browsers are faster now than they were in XP times, by any metric you choose.
@stilescrisis not that I'd notice with how bloated sites have gotten
Cassandrich@stilescrisis @mikoto It's hard to compare because sites aren't the same but I think your claim is not clearly true. Nobody cares that the jit is 5x faster now or that it even exists. The browser ui layer is much slower and more bloated, and more interactions have delays waiting for network or js code to do things rather than just doing it, and memory efficiency is much worse (= cache misses and swapping).
@stilescrisis Mine has Debian on it and really the only thing that holds it back from being daily driveable is the web browser and web apps, the daily productivity stuff works fine otherwise
@mikoto That's not surprising; a browser is far more complex than a single-purpose app. A modern browser is basically a cross-platform VM with a standardized layout language baked in.
Unixorn - 90% Snark by weightLike the joke goes, when hardware engineers give us more performance software engineers promptly squander it.
@stilescrisis @mikoto My everyday laptop is 2GB and fine.
@stilescrisis @mikoto Alpine Linux.
Stephen Brooks 🦆@mikoto webdevs have to jump through quite a lot of hoops to burn 5 billion operations displaying 50 bytes of information
MOVED TO @@mikoto preact is, at least in apps ive made, surprisingly fast on all browsers with even worse cpus and some ram intensive javascript optimizations turned off
Echedelle ⚧@mikoto the ones I have written work on it :3
calcifer 🧯@mikoto this is why I like testing on my pineBook and running usability studies on a little NUC
Meowbotage! >:3c@mikoto People shouldn't sleep on the classic eeepc's! Put 32bit Void Linux on mine, and lasts 7 hrs on a charge with the same battery. No GUI installed yet, but lynx is a good test for accessibility.
Kirtai 🏳️⚧️@meowbotage I have one running Alpine Linux for messing around with Smalltalk.
Inexplicable music scientist Melody@mikoto That's actually something I want to do with my game. If it can't run on a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 30fps, it's not optimised enough
Epsi@mikoto I have one and had to use it as my portable school machine and even like years ago it was almost unuseable for modern web.
Now I use it as a network diagnostic tool when my home network gets fucked because its tiny and at least it works for terminal stuff.
Now I use it as a network diagnostic tool when my home network gets fucked because its tiny and at least it works for terminal stuff.
stefan@mikoto Spoiler: It does not work...
Panopticola@mikoto
Maybe we devs should incur some kind of responsibility for the energy inefficiencies of our code. A memory leak or sloppy sort or calling obsolete resources can be ignored and deployed because it isn't very noticeable, but multiply by millions and you are burning things up.
I stopped playing with the sparkly chatbots unless I really feel it's useful, due to the energy and water waste.
RealGene ☣️@Panopticola @mikoto
Years ago I attended a workshop given by TI on the MSP430, which at the time was one of the lowest-power consumption microprocessors on the market. These were going into lots of battery-powered devices, and the presenter said, "Every line of code is a little bit of battery power you will never get back."
Years ago I attended a workshop given by TI on the MSP430, which at the time was one of the lowest-power consumption microprocessors on the market. These were going into lots of battery-powered devices, and the presenter said, "Every line of code is a little bit of battery power you will never get back."
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@Panopticola @mikoto chatbots is like the one thing that typically makes me close the tab and never return, specially ones that gratuitously open-up themselves taking more space than clippy used to on a 600×800 display.
@lanodan @mikoto Ah, well, I was glibly referring to the massive energy and water consumption when I log on to Large Language Models like ChatGPT, AKA stochastic parrots etc, but everyday dumb spammy website bot interruptions are a bounce for me too, and I try to do it the second a chat window pops up so the analytics sends a message to anyone checking.
Bench Mark@mikoto with a spinning hard drive, not an SSD
Joshua M. Clulow@mikoto I wonder how easy it is to arrange for the same thing in a virtual machine; constrained RAM and disk capacity is obviously easy, as well as picking a fixed small resolution for the virtual framebuffer, but CPU and network and storage _speed_ seems somewhat more difficult to control on desktop hypervisors.
@jmc you could limit CPU time, also there are full emulators like 86box that can emulate Pentium II and earlier CPUs, though you do need good single core performance
@jmc sadly nothing that can emulate anything newer with cycle accuracy, but the cpu time thing might help
@mikoto Yeah. I know how I would limit CPU usage on illumos systems, and I assume something comparable exists on Linux with cgroups -- but I wonder about how easy that is to do on, say, a Mac.
@jmc maybe there's a way to do it on there, but I don't know as I don't have a mac
@jmc @mikoto If I assume this is about the original context of:
> I wonder how easy it is to arrange for the same thing in a virtual machine
Then at least on VirtualBox you have the option to put on a cap on the emulated processor speed, surely there's similar options for other hypervisors?
Sadly I've no idea if there's an option to slow down network and storage 
Mitsunee | 光音@mikoto How about my biggest react app. 6x slowdown is the best I can do here, it finished the first rerender around here, less than half the time it took the browser to show the prerendered HTML. According to this benchmark the site used at most 17.1MB of memory, not counting what the browser itself uses. Pretty sure that'd work just fine on way worse hardware, I remember having no issues on my now 8 year old i5 either, which was before all the performance improvements I put in this year alone.
Moss@mikoto or any affordable samsung a series phone
wb x64@mikoto that presumes that you can even open latest Firefox on such a computer 🤦
Adam ♿@mikoto yes, but also what phone do you use? It's probably more powerful than that
Dave/Loebas 
@mikoto i had a asus transformerbook from 2017 that has only 2GB if RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. It came with a full version of Windows 10. The drive was constantly full. Sadly it bit the dust recently.
MIGRATED TO @@mikoto I have an Atom netbook/x86 tablet with like 2gb of RAM just like this.
Apparently it has a 64-bit CPU but has some weird bootloader stuff where it can only boot 32-bit UEFI images? Some distros work out of the box (namely Fedora)
Also got some other distros working like PopOS by using a distro that had a working GRUB, going into the GRUB console, hotswapping the USB out for the desired distro, and then manually booting using its kernel and initrd images. From there you can do basically whatever after installation including installing a version of GRUB that would work.
Apparently the original manufacturer didn't seem to bother with this weirdness either since it came with 32-bit Windows 8
Cegorach@mikoto I still miss my Toshiba AC100… but not for browsing the web. :D
Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC@mikoto They should also test their software on RPi 2+3.
taylor 
@mikoto this i have a 2015 macbook pro on my desk
(my only widely used application targets macs that can run relatively-modern 3d applications anyway)
mirabilos@mikoto “not.”
But, yeah, they should. There also should be a mandatory ed(1) utilisation month every, I don’t know, five years or so.
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️@mikoto
I have one, and still use it occasionally!
I have one, and still use it occasionally!
mayor of tr*nny townIn that same vein, app developers need to try testing their apps on phones more than a year old.
HowToPhil (Phillip R)@mikoto I have one I sometimes bust out to use as a Focuswriter machine
Need to rebuild the battery pack someday though...
aeva@mikoto are there any browsers that even work on that target anymore? I got an old EEEPC from a friend that I was hoping to use for casual web browsing, and I wasn't able to really find a workable config for it. Firefox struggles on my old core2duo laptop :(
Oblomov