| ▲ | aeonik a day ago |
| Modern app bloat in one analogy: Business logic size: ~20 bytes
Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000 Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound. Then the whole app would weigh:
1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds What weighs ~2.35 million pounds? - A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs
- Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs
- A blue whale: ~330,000 lbs
TOTAL: ~2,304,000 lbsThe business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top. Just to run 20 bytes of logic. |
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| ▲ | Eric_WVGG 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| bravo, Douglas Adams would have been proud |
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| ▲ | m3047 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Very nice. Maybe that should be submitted to The Register for their units of measurement menagerie. |
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| ▲ | WD-42 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a cool visualization, thanks. |
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| ▲ | aquafox a day ago | parent | next [-] | | On a related note: Transporting a human in a car is (in relation to weight and size) like using a standard shopping cart to transport two 1L bottles of water. So the next time you walk through a pedestrian area, imagine everyone carrying a bag would use a shopping cart instead. That would be a huge traffic jam -- exactly like what you see on the road! | | |
| ▲ | WD-42 a day ago | parent [-] | | I've been pretty aware of this ever since I became a cyclist. I will ride down to the corner store to pick up a six pack and some chips, throw them in a backpack and ride back. It's easy. I see people driving their cars to do the same thing. All that weight and space for a 6 bottles of beer. There is massive waste all around us. | | |
| ▲ | spiritplumber 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A long time ago in San Antonio TX I was pulled over by the cops while biking back to my little apartment with a bunch of groceries. They were unwilling to believe that an adult would leave the car home to get groceries by bicycle. (I'm from Italy originally). | | |
| ▲ | bjelkeman-again 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | We experienced the same when we walked down the hill to go shopping in Laguna Niguel, CA. Stopped by cops for walking to the store. Nothing more happened. |
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| ▲ | lostlogin 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is also the time component. Off peak and with a decent sized backpack (change of clothes, laptop, food etc) it takes me the same time to go 6km as it does to drive it. At peak it’s 1/4 to 1/3rd the time. Cars are slow around town. | | |
| ▲ | Zambyte 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The time component has to factor in both the traffic while driving, and the extra time required to find available parking. I bought an electric scooter a few weeks ago, and I have come to realize that my travel time is pretty much purely a function of distance. I just roll up past traffic if there is any, lock up on any bolted down object, do my business, unlock, and roll out. If anything, I feel like traveling at rush hour is actually strictly better for me. Cars being slow doesn't slow me down, but with the average speed being so much lower during rush hour, it seems like it makes it so if a driver hits me, it would be at a lower speed. |
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| ▲ | ornornor 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Getting a trailer (burley cargo in this case, but applies more generally) has been a game changer. I can even bike to ikea and bring back flat packed furniture with it. Or do the weekly groceries. The trailer can carry up to 100lbs iirc (I have an e-bike) Short errands are much nicer with a bike: less effort than walking, much faster than walking, no parking headache at destination, cool breeze in your hair, and free (no gas, insurance, parking, tickets…) | |
| ▲ | tengwar2 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a reasonable solution, but let's not forget that simply walking is often at least as good a solution in many countries. | |
| ▲ | bongodongobob 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those people could be driving from 20 minutes away or on their way home from work, or running other errands or picking kids up from school or any number of things. Good for you though. | | |
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| ▲ | sheepscreek 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I like your username, and what happened to WD-41? | | |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Excellent point! And to top it off, the dual flights and whale would need complex orchestration too! We just call it Kubernetes… |
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| ▲ | anon7000 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo, and it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside vs a smaller airplane… you’d probably do it! There’s no incentive in software to get a smaller, more efficient plane, and plenty of incentive to use the big thing for free that has all the extra features |
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| ▲ | GTP a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry. | | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Its called externalized cost and its as real in software as it is IRL | | |
| ▲ | GTP 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | So the cost is there, it's just not paid (directly) by the developer. But we all end up paying someone else's externalized cost, included said developer that is paying some other developers' externalized costs. | | |
| ▲ | aziaziazi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Consider also the missed market opportunity: my personal devices are 13yo laptop and 9yo phone. If an app isn’t compatible or makes it lag, I delete it and download a competing one. I’m not alone, and yes: I have money to spend on your app. I just don’t want/need to upgrade hardware that often. | |
| ▲ | josephg 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah. I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post doing the math on that. If I spend $2000 on a computer, and that gets me a certain amount of ram and cpu and so on, we can figure out a dollar figure on that bloat. Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software. | |
| ▲ | jorvi 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode. The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams. | | |
| ▲ | HappMacDonald an hour ago | parent [-] | | Or they could just send the video uncompressed and then it would take even less hardware resources to decode on the client side. Why, in a sense it would be a lot more like decoding analog television signals at that point. (Not least of which since few clients would have the network bandwidth to handle more than 360-480p of that ;) |
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| ▲ | dented42 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space… When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up. | | |
| ▲ | leptons a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory". | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is how we have ended up with huge cars and huge houses etc. Storing huge volumes of unneeded junk isn’t solved by have more space. Store less junk. | | |
| ▲ | leptons 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can live however you want to live. I will live however I want to. 47MB is not worth worrying about, at all. |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 47MB is about 3x the space once required by a widely used commercial graphical operating system. It was even enough to also include Microsoft Word with plenty of space left. How far we’ve fallen. | | |
| ▲ | leptons 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're living in the past. Hard drives are now up to 36TB. Hard drives are always getting bigger. 47MB isn't worth worrying about, at all. | | |
| ▲ | mlhpdx 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is such a weird rationalization. You’d sell a kidney to be a 10x developer but making an app 1000000x smaller isn’t worth a thought? Maybe that’s why the former hasn’t happened. | |
| ▲ | superb_dev 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yup and those 36TB are cheap and common! Right? | |
| ▲ | wolpoli 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | While it is true that hard drives have large amount of storage, it is unlikely that are any Mac with a 36TB hard drive attached that needs to overcome WiFi time limit. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 47 MiB only costs $0.0002. What has fallen is storage price. |
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| ▲ | anonymars 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | These crappy WiFi portals are known for having ample download speeds too, right? |
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| ▲ | dtech a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is more a tragedy of the commons thing. For each individual app the comparison holds true | | |
| ▲ | IgorPartola a day ago | parent | next [-] | | And since we do have app stores as gate keepers, this could easily be remedied by the app stores. They wouldn’t even have to penalize you. Just put a score on there for app size (and app responsiveness) compared to the median in that category. Put this near the star rating from the reviews. Executives don’t generally care that you as an engineer want to reduce an app size by 10% but they really really care about how the app looks on the app stores because that’s what they show to people and what they are judged on. | |
| ▲ | kulahan a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tragedy of the commons or just a really bad industry? |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People usually think that but when it comes to attack surface, change management, upgrade issues, etc —- the extra stuff isn’t entirely free… Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out. Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way… | | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo Qatar might even give you a plane! | |
| ▲ | numpad0 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This has to be Soviet Shoe Factory Principle in action, not just ignored negative externalities. Everyone relies on shipping more code for their employment, rather than more values, which incentivizes that behavior. 1: https://wiki.c2.com/?SovietShoeFactoryPrinciple | |
| ▲ | phyzome 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you're conflating "no incentive" (which might be true) with "no downsides" (which is not). |
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| ▲ | shepherdjerred 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How many 747's can the average person fit on the 128GB+ smartphone in their pocket? |
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| ▲ | jofla_net a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| says more about sociology, really. |
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| ▲ | foxglacier 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Human time is money in software, more analogous to mass in physical goods. So you should calculate the time savings for all the people using the app vs entering the code themselves. Mass is a nonsense analogy that doesn't reveal anything useful. |
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| ▲ | paxcoder a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| While I appreciate criticizing bloat (why are we packing Chromium in every app again?), I would like to warn against watching every "pound". Images, for example, "weigh" a lot more than code but that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose and add value. That being said, the fact that quick maths can give you a 6 orders of magnitude difference between functional code and the package is probably reason for concern. |
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| ▲ | BestHackerOnHN 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| OMG you win HackerNews today with this comment! Super HackerNews!!! |
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| ▲ | bognition 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is an absurd way to think of this. Following this same train of thoughts for humans: The business logic for humans is a single reproductive cell. A single sperm weighs 2.3 x 10^-11 grams. If the average male weighs 75kg the. The bloat ratio for a human male is 3.2x10^15 Getting back to the app there is huge value in not needing to run the command yourself. Sure it’s wrapped in a UI that comes with “bloat” but honestly who cares. When was the last time someone needed to worry about hard drive space, when it comes to a 40mb file. |
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| ▲ | m11a 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, the apps often come bundled with a bunch of other stuff. Automatic updates, background workers, telemetry … All of which sucks up your compute resources and battery. Repeat for every such little utility app you have on your Mac. Some may implement that random stuff inefficiently (eg very frequent telemetry), which sucks even more. Some of it may even be wrong, vibe coded, or copy pasted. Personally, puts me off installing random utility apps, even if the single utility would be useful. | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the human analogy, the human has to be the entire computer too. It's all functional, not much bloat. For the app, the computer is external. It really is bloat. |
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