[CobsterLock]

I have a coworker that always preaches testing on bad hardware. Sometimes it catches multi threaded issues, like if you arent locking correctly and use a resource before its generated. Other than that it helps ensure that you are squeezing more performance out of the software rather than relying on fast hardware. I think this sentiment comes after dealing with a ton of chromium apps that can be resource hogs. Presumably they are developed on machines with tons of resources then forced onto my dev machine and still use tons of resource that I need to write my own stuff. Personally I dont care too much, if the software has performance critical requirements, it should be thoroughly tested in some pipeline not my machine.

[michaelpb]

Re. your last point, I generally agree with the idea that performance testing should be automated, not on an ad-hoc local machine basis.

But I also do think developers live in bit of a "CPU bubble", and we need to break out of it. Most people don't have pricey hardware, and no matter what your reasoning (environmental / e-waste, user experience, simple love of the craft, etc), it is important to write performant software. In using old hardware I've discovered many, many apps are so incredibly frustrating to use for average users --- borderline unusable --- and I suspect their developers aren't even aware.

So, I don't know what the issue is, if it's tech management trends (eg "sales-driven" development), or it's a lack of automated performance testing, or beefy dev boxes, or what. But IMO it's downright embarrassing to the entire industry how bad software has gotten on average.

[kitsunesoba]

Fully agree. I have a couple of old C2D/C2Q machines still kicking around and after upgrading their storage to SSDs, running the latest Win10 builds they're still totally viable day-to-day machines… well, until you fire up a notoriously heavy web/electron app, and then they're suddenly on their knees. If the devs working on these apps had to use such machines even a single day per week I'm sure we'd see marked improvements.

[michaelpb]

Exactly. I know this may give grumpy-old-man vibes, but I find it ridiculous that with a Pentium III with ~0.1GB of RAM we could do similar day-to-day tasks with IRC or AIM or whatever (group chatting, sharing media, etc), but running Slack on a computer that's 10-100x as powerful can get such terrible performance I'm sometimes forced to type in a text editor and copy over.