[skrebbel]

I don't mind any of these issues to be honest, but I do mind how hopelessly slow it is.

Is it also super sluggish for all you SF Bay area people? I can't tell if it's just network latency on a heavy protocol, or just slow slow.

[turtles_]

Agreed, the slowness is especially painful on mobile, which is the exact opposite of what you need from a note taking tool. I use other tools on mobile and copy to notion later which is exactly as convenient as it sounds.

I do agree with the thrust of the article too, although I don't find any one UX issue (beyond slowness) a deal-breaker, but together they're collectively a pretty frustrating experience.

[jitl]

(I work at Notion)

The mobile situation was much worse a year ago. We made big start time improvements by removing React Native and rebuilding our caching layer, but we still have a long way to go to beat Apple Notes. Using the Notion widget on iOS can really help with quick access for grocery lists.

On Android devices the situation is still not usable.

[chrisfosterelli]

In fairness, the work on the mobile front has shown a lot and I appreciate that! The android app used to take so long to load (and half the time it would just sit in a permanent loading state) that I flat out didn't use it. Lately it's improved a lot and is 'good enough' for my use case. The phone, at it's core, isn't really the tool I want to use for any long-form writing but it's totally sufficient for referring to documents now.

My biggest "speed frustration" right now is opening a new window in the Desktop app. Searching + navigating to a page within an existing window has gotten to be super speedy, but searching and cmd+enter to open in a new window still has quite some lag to it.

[benlc]

I appreciate the honesty with the situation on Android. Not usable is how I would describe it. Really looking forward to this getting addressed, keep it up

[trinix912]

Yeah, it's really slow on the mobile. I rarely ever use Notion for quick notes because it just takes so long to load.

[gazelleeatslion]

On a new MBP M1 w16GB RAM it is really snappy.

For a mere thousands of dollars you can join the fun.

I imagine by M2 though this golden year will be far gone as everyone increases even more how much resources their apps eat.

[systemvoltage]

PMs have gotten addicted to the sugar rush of features and developers to fried salty frameworks, creating a culture of obesity in software engineering. This needs to stop. Every prod test should go through a 10 year old system and perform satisfactorily.

[josephg]

I couldn't agree more.

I have a 4 year old laptop that cost me $3000. Xcode is so laggy sometimes that if I type, it'll miss keystrokes and words come out garbled beyond recognition. A few weeks ago some source code I downloaded from github wouldn't compile because the swift compiler spent too long doing type inference, and decided to error out.

I'm haunted by a vision of computing. In the vision, us software folks just add bloat to everything until it starts feeling gluggly and slow on our modern expensive computers. Then we optimize our programs just enough to keep them running vaguely ok on whatever hardware is on our desks.

The only way to have a snappy computer running modern software is via the tireless work of hardware engineers. Whenever a big hardware performance improvement comes (like the M1), there's a window of a year or so where if you upgrade, everything will run fast again. And of course, all the devs with the new machines stop optimizing their programs and gradually everything slows down again. Eventually our software goes back to being as slow as it was before, except if you didn't upgrade your computer, now it barely functions.

I want off this ride. My 6 year old FreeBSD server is somehow still snappy and responsive. Maybe the answer is to just not run modern desktop software.

[novok]

A good chunk of that is unique to the swift part of xcode. Do the same things in an Objective-C codebase and you'll be surprised about how snappy and non-buggy everything is.

I maintain today you could've gotten %80-%90 of the benefits of swift with a syntax refresh and add a few new cheap to compile features to Objective-C itself, like stronger nullbables and the ADT enums.

I think the 'good enough software' stuff will stop happening when physical limits start limiting improvements in compute, because the only way to have a competitive advantage then is through better software.

I hope that day is far away although, because it means that something like 8k consumer VR is something that will never happen, where the software is written properly to take proper advantage of the hardware.

[josephg]

Right; probably because most of the obj-c compiler toolchain was implemented when computers were slower. I was beating on xcode in my comment because it deserves it, but this problem isn't confined to xcode and swift. Compiling rust is also extremely slow. The new reddit feels like a slideshow (and despite launching years ago, how have the reddit team still not fixed the performance problems??)

We're having this conversation in the context of notion. Starting up Notion on my laptop feels like wading through honey. I really want to love notion, but every time I open it and try to do anything I find my motivation tricking away. Notion isn't even doing anything impressive with all that compute - its just slow. The sales pitch I make in my head for notion is that its a place to organize all my notes and workflows, but like Jira, living in notion means accepting that I work at the speed notion does, and that feels antithetical to the feeling of productivity I have in snappier, lighter tools like Bear and iA writer.

But Notion and XCode aren't really the problem. The problem is cultural. It seems to be the worst in the web ecosystem, though its not confined there. My favorite example of all is this issue in web3.js[1]. I can't help but play Benny Hill music in my head while I scroll through this 3 year old, apparently unsolvable issue thread.

When the new M1 macs came out lots of people were complaining that there's no 32 gig variant. Holy cow that is so many bytes. The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of ram. The NES ran super mario bros in 2kb. Its completely ridiculous to me that our software can even fill 16gb doing everyday computing. Is there a ceiling? Will there ever be a ceiling, or should we expect a document editor in 2030 to sit on 256gb of ram, just because thats how much ram modern javascript frameworks use by then?

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/issues/1178#issuecomment...

[novok]

It's an economic tradeoff. Engineers are expensive and businesses choose what is most productive for them to what customers respond to. Also performance work is not fun and more work than new features. Performance bugs are harder to detect and quantify than normal crash bugs and such because they are statistical ranges, not binary on off states.

Performance is taken into account when it matters for the product, you'll notice this in games where they do a lot of perf improvement work.

Also swift & rust are slow due to their design as a language. They provide very strong guarantees and make a lot of thing static. It's very similar to the reasons why C++ is slow to compile.

Also notion is like 10 engineers last time I checked, and they've decided to go towards speed of dev & features more than nicer, but slower to develop tools.

[krono]

Hardware has 0 to do with the 10 second loading spinners on every other random route change.

[usaphp]

Yep, I stopped using it because it became painfully slow, and I only had about 50 items on a page. I’m using 2018 15” MacBook Pro core i7. It’s a petty because the reason I started to use it was it’s speed and light weight, now it turned into another monolith, just like the ones it tried to beat in the beginning

[Existenceblinks]

<I'm not using it> but I tried inspect this page https://www.notion.so/Notion-Template-Gallery-181e961aeb5c4e... in firefox console, the memory tab shows 160MB .. super crazy.

[SwiftyBug]

It is indeed very slow. I don't understand why though.

[0xCMP]

Ha, yea it's slow, but WAY FASTER than it was at launch.

I think it's how they cache/request the pages. The slowness is usually in switching pages.

[slaymaker1907]

I worked at an org that used Confluence heavily and remember how long load times could get if the page was large.

I was therefore pretty surprised to hear that Notion is apparently worse. I suspect a lot of the sluggishness with both programs is at least partially because they don't render much server side. Compare how slowly a .ipynb file loads on GitHub compared to Markdown.

[Kimitri]

Yep, it feels really sluggish. We benchmarked several tools to work as a documentation platform for our company. Notion was one of the candidates but it felt extremely slow and somehow really awkward to use. In the end we decided to use Slite and it has really served us well. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for this kind of tool!

[preommr]

Is it slow for all pages or just ones with lots of content?

I've tested notion on some old laptops and it did ok. But I only tested it on some empty documents, so maybe that's why it wasn't too slow.

[ysw0]

I think it's calls + the app itself (Electron?) is slow. After a certain page size is reached, editing becomes unbearably slow which necessitates starting a new page.