You spend lots of time waiting on your computer. You pause while apps start and web pages load. Spinner icons are everywhere. Hardware gets faster, but software still feels slow. What gives? If you use your computer to do important work, you deserve fast software. Too much of today’s software falls short. At the Ink & Switch research lab we’ve researched why that is, so that we can do better. This article shares we’ve learned…Let’s look at an example of how latency can add up:
…There is a deep stack of technology that makes a modern computer interface respond to a user’s requests. Even something as simple as pressing a key on a keyboard and having the corresponding character appear in a text input box traverses a lengthy, complex gauntlet of steps, from the scan rate of the keyboard, through the OS and framework processing layers, through the graphics card rendering and display refresh rate. There is reason for this complexity, and yet we feel sad that computer users trying to be productive with these devices are so often left waiting, watching spinners, or even just with the slight but still perceptible sense that their devices simply can’t keep up with them.
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What feels slow
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Latency not throughput
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Touch interfaces
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Typing
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Mousing
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Applications
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Real-world apps
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Where slowness comes from
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Input devices
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Sample rates
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Displays and GPUs
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Cycle stacking
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Runtime overhead
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Latency by design
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User-hostile work
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Application code
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Putting it together
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Toward fast software
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References