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by josephg 899 days ago
Huh - it was surprising how poorly Bear fares in that benchmark given I use it regularly and find it snappy and responsive. But then I looked closer and saw you were loading War and Peace into it.

I'll let you in on a dirty secret: Most of my documents aren't as long as war and peace. I care a lot more about "normal" document sizes and real world typing latency. Is Anytype actually slow in this case?
1 comments
rubymamis 899 days ago
My benchmark is largely based on the "Moby Dick Workout"[1] of Jesse Grosjean. I agree with him that ANY text editor should pass these tests. And block editors are first and foremost text editors. I just decided to take it up a notch and do my tests on War and Peace.

Another very crucial point, a good deal of software today is written with no oversight on performance at all, so you end up needing to buy the latest hardware to run apps smoothly. Why would anyone need a M3 Macbook to run a text editor fast??

This is why I used a 2017 Macbook Air in my tests and not the M1 Pro next to it. Efficient software matters for the longevity of hardware.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/moby-dick-workout/

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josephg 899 days ago
Yeah thats fair. I have a friend building a personal thought management system, like roam research. Her goal is to store everything she thinks in her life.

In the 8 years or so she's been working on it she's recorded about 100k thoughts. So, 1 million thoughts is probably enough to store everything you think in an entire lifetime. Thats a bit of a grim thought, but its probably about the right performance target for something like that. There's something very calming about knowing that if it performs well with 1M thoughts, its fit for purpose.

Its nice to have benchmarks like that.

For what its worth, I'd recommend explaining all of that with the benchmark explanation. "Measured on a 2017 macbook air with the text of War and Peace". Seeing Bear crash doesn't really tell me enough about whats going on.

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rubymamis 898 days ago
> There's something very calming about knowing that if it performs well with 1M thoughts, its fit for purpose.

Exactly. I've been using my note-taking app (of which Plume is built on) since 2014, so I have 4850 notes in total, and it's still rock solid and fast.

Another plus of efficient software is that my 2017 Macbook Air actually loads text ~2x faster than the best competitor (Bike) on a 2021 M1 Pro (with much more performance)

2017 MacBook Air:

Plume: 0.8 seconds

Bike: 3.46 seconds

MacBook M1 Pro:

Plume: 0.3 seconds

Bike: 1.5 seconds

That alone says a lot.

> For what its worth, I'd recommend explaining all of that with the benchmark explanation. "Measured on a 2017 macbook air with the text of War and Peace". Seeing Bear crash doesn't really tell me enough about whats going on.

Thanks for letting me know. Do you have a suggestion for how to convey it better?

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