Faster hardware is a bad first solution to slow software

kixik@lemmy.ml to General Programming Discussion@lemmy.ml – 130 points –
Faster hardware is a bad first solution to slow software
pythonspeed.com
8

The "get a better computer" response to slow software is unfortunetly more and more popular especialy among game devs.

"Our game runs like **** on your 2 yr old top of the line pc? Just get a 4090 and a 13900k. Its not our problem that the game eats 21GB of VRAM and takes up 700GB of storage."

Hmm. I'd actually argue it's a good solution in some cases. We run multiple services where load is intermittent, services are short-lived, or the code is complex and hard to refactor. Just adding hardware resources can be a much cheaper solution than optimizing code.

It can be cheap in the short term, but is not always an overall sustainable solution.