[maccard]

I switched from android back to iOS last year. There seems to be some sort of inherent latency in either android or Samsung’s UI that causes the UI thread to lag behind your inputs by a noticeable amount, and for the UI thread to block app actions in many cases.

Things like summoning a keyboard causing my 120hz galaxy phone to drop to sub 10fps playing the intro animation for GBoard were just rampant. All non existent in iOS

[erinaceousjones]

I do wonder if part of it is down to Android default animation speeds.... Pixel 6 here, Gboard snappy enough. Something I do on every android device I own though is go into developer settings and change all the animation durations to 0.5x. Makes stuff seem snappier. In reality I'm sure it's dropping just as many frames as it async loads garbage enterprise uncompressed asset icons or whatever, but hey it shows up on screen 2x as fast!!!!

Edit: oh, no, you have a point about the UI blocking stuff, it's fine when apps are loaded and active but "cold booting" a UI component definitely has lags in stupid places, android UX feels like a web perform sometimes due to that.... Tap button, go on holiday for a week, come back and it's responded to the button press (while you were trying to do something completely different and now you've pressed something else and you're not sure what because this time the button you pressed closed the activity overlay 1ms after)

[genewitch]

I begin to wonder if all the commenters in this thread have compromised devices. I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago) - my Linux machines are fast (gentoo) and my windows 10 and 11 machines are fast. My kid's computer is an i3 7350k and he plays roblox, Minecraft, teardown on it with no issues. That computer is a couple years older than he is at 9-10 years old. That computer's twin is my nas backup with 10gbe running windows - the drive array refused to work at any decent speed on Linux and I didn't want jbod, I wanted RAID.

Some things are slow, like discord on windows takes ~12 seconds before it starts to pop in ui elements after you double click. My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that run windows 11 fine.

[maccard]

Did you watch the videos linked in the article?

> I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago)

How quick is the Share menu on your samsung? On mine, it takes about 3 seconds of repainting itself before it settles down. On iOS there's about a 100ms pause and the drawer pops up, fully populated. I found [0] which is a perfect example of this sort of bloat.

> My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that run windows 11 fine.

My main computer is a 24 core i9 with 64GB ram on NVMe. It runs windows fine. But, I saw exactly the same behaviour out of the box on this machine (and on the machine I replaced) as the linked article shows. I can compile, play games, do AV transcoding. But using apps like slack or discord is like walking through molasses, and even launching lightweight apps like WIndows Terminal, and Notepad have a noticeable delay from button press to the window appearing on screen. There's just something a bit broken about it.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-a...

[genewitch]

No i was referring only to the comments here. The share menu comes up real fast, there's no "delay", as soon as the menu with "share" goes away, the bottom slides up and the share panel appears, icons populated.

Is Slack also electron? a cursory search says discord is electron. Now, firefox lags to start, too - compared to edge, which is nearly instant to "launch". Brave is also <1second to launch. I don't use "notepad", but i just ran it, and while it's slower than the old notepad.exe, it's much faster than notepad++ to come up - but i generally launch that once and leave it running, same with firefox.

I don't use windows terminal, i use pwsh 7.5.x, and it's <1 second to be ready for input. the window comes up real fast, and then the text appears about that long again later. I launched cmd.exe and it came up perhaps a bit slower than pwsh, but not noticeably so.

this is what i am talking about, i don't notice anything slow on my computer, any of my computers, really. This leads me to believe that either the people who do experience slowness have a compromised system, or some other issue. 5400 RPM data/boot drive, only using electron apps (which are slow in general), or otherwise misconfigured.

I haven't used Ubuntu desktop since they tampered with the system menu/start menu, so i have no idea what that is like now. The server can be snappy, though - you just have to configure networking and the like correctly. I'm not a fan of systemd; that colors my opinion of a lot of linux systems. I use Gentoo and Devuan because they fully support OpenRC, which i consider vastly superior for my use cases. However, i do maintain a couple of ubuntu based OSes for neighbors on HP EliteDesk SFF computers, and they seem alright, 3-4x as fast as an rpi3/4 at ubuntu desktop, as far as launch lag and boot times and the like.

I think to put this to bed, we need to establish a baseline or at least a list of applications to launch while screen recording, and then literally count frames. It would be funny if this was all perception and it wasn't actually "slow", that is, "seconds to load" is actually like 2 seconds, and not 12...

[maccard]

> I think to put this to bed, we need to establish a baseline or at least a list of applications to launch while screen recording, and then literally count frames. It would be funny if this was all perception and it wasn't actually "slow", that is, "seconds to load" is actually like 2 seconds, and not 12...

2 seconds is an eternity. Its 15 round trips from London to New York, 5-8GB read from an NVMe drive, and 7 billion cpu cycles per core - with even the cheapest devices on the market having multiple cores. There’s no really any excuse for things being that slow.

Also I think that this idea that the only number that matters is the synthetic exact frame count from interaction to window for a specific list of operations is how we ended up in the scenario where windows explorer takes over a second to show the window on modern OS’s despite multiple orders of magnitude more computing power being available. Nobody really cares about what the actual performance of the running system is, as long as the exact part they’re responsible for doesn’t trip an alert.

A few years ago I worked on a project for a batch operation that was done a few hundred times a day. It took 15 minutes to run and it was starting to get in the way of things. Another team had hired 2 engineers to spin up kafka and a k8s cluster to queue these operations up, along with a reporting dashboard and metrics for queue length etc.

I ran the code through a profiler and found a hotspot on shutdown where we were searching through an array millions of times to remove a single entry, repeatedly, until the array was finished. I replaced it with a set lookup in reverse, and changed a handful of places where we rebuilt this massive array and did the same thing to use the same data structure and it dropped to under 15 seconds with about a weeks work. I identified enough other wins that would bring it under a second that would negate the need for the entire other project to exist, but it had already been approved and budget allocated for it, so last I heard they’re still taking 15 seconds and spending hundreds of thousands a month on this absolutely gargantuan monitoring system that they don’t need.

In both cases, IMO, a vision holder of “this isn’t good enough” using the product in their own device at home is what’s needed

[coolcase]

My share is 1s. Didn't realise it was that slow. From the UI interaction I wonder if it is on purpose to avoid an accidental share.

[keyringlight]

FWIW I updated my phone to a relatively budget samsung recently, and had a similar noticeable delay to bring up the keyboard, installing 'simple keyboard' from F-droid seems to have helped. I wouldn't be surprised if it is missing features compared to the samsung/google ones where their absence will annoy a power user, but for whatever subset I use it works fine and doesn't appear as though my phone hangs.

[nottorp]

But but ... Samsung has bigger numbers in the spec sheet! It must be faster!