How do you handle the poor performance of LC 7?

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:

 > How do I handle the poor performance of LC 7?
 >
 > Make sure I deploy my standalones on computers that are over 7 years
 > old; then one doesn't notice the difference!
 >
 > Seriously; most of my computers are a bit like me: "of a certain age"
 > and I haven't really noticed a difference.

Me neither.  That is, once I stepped away from the benchmarks and the 
vague complaints and actually ran my software in v7.

Some of my friends poke fun at my choice of modest hardware, but the 
reasons I prefer the components I work with extends far beyond being 
able to spend the cost difference on a weekend at a seaside resort:

Many years ago I was a Beta tester for a product which shall remain 
nameless, shortly after it was acquired by another company also unnamed 
here.  Prior to the acquisition it was a Mac-only app that ran 
beautifully, but that summer the acquiring team folded the code into 
their cross-platform framework, and the app size exploded while 
performance dropped about proportionately.  With some features the 
performance loss was significant enough to impair usability.

So I submitted a couple of performance-related bugs, feeling that was a 
reasonable thing to do since back in those days my hardware habit was to 
buy Apple's second-best machine every three years at the outside, so I 
never worked on the latest and greatest (that is, after the clone I 
bought from PowerComputing, but that's another story), but somewhat 
ahead of what the average computer user would have.

My reports came back "UTR" - Unable to Reproduce.

We went back and forth and ultimately I asked for a machine profile so I 
could compare what the devs were working with to what I was working with.

It turned out that the acquiring company is very generous with their 
developers, outfitting them with the very latest and fastest Macs loaded 
with maximum RAM and the fastest HDDs on the market.

In short, the developers were completely insulated from any 
understanding of the average user experience.  It simply wasn't possible 
for them to know how slow their code had become in the eyes of their market.

I can't really blame them, but I did find it curious that the product 
manager didn't notice this performance disparity while managing the 
testing pool.

Ever since then my hardware choices have become increasingly lean, 
buying only the CPU power I truly need while keeping an eye on what 
average customers are using.

And I'll admit I have a simpler life than those devs: as a scripter 
using LiveCode, I never have to wait for a compile cycle. :)

So all hail cheap hardware!  It keeps our code honest.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com