[valuearb]

I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs.

We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster.

This was on Mac Plus.

[Nition]

Meanwhile in 2016: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283

[digi_owl]

Truly seems like those that do not learn from history is forced to relive it...

[bzbarsky]

Software still does this today. For example, a large part of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822 is down to progress bar rendering making the loading of the saved-data file be much slower. :( See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822#c32 for the most recent data there...

[Namrog84]

I wonder if it was trashing the cache or something? What was so bad about this particular progress bar?

[Gracana]

No cache on a Plus. It was probably just updating the progress bar too frequently.

The 68k in the Plus is an 8MHz 32 bit processor with 16 bit data bus, 4 clock cycles per bus access if there are no wait states, and most instructions are more than one word long. There's not a whole lot of time to do useful work!