How much time is spent waiting for tech "buffering/connecting/signing in"?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Oftentimes when I open a program on my computer or open a streaming service, my computer/TV/phone takes a few seconds to make the connection and open the desired function.

I realize that folk tend to get more impatient as tech improves, and that the vast majority of such “delays” are only a few seconds long. But seconds can add up. Has anyone had tried to estimate the amount of time in a typical year that a reasonably connected adult spends watching that little circle spin or that little bar to fill? What is your guess?

My work computer takes 4-5 minutes to fully boot up each workday, so that would present one baseline element for me.

2

I know I don’t know.

But for years now I’ve had a saying. Which I often trot out to cashiers while trying to pay by credit card, or clerks at doctor’s offices or such digging around in e-records for me.

If computers are so fast and humans are so slow, how come we spend so much of each day waiting for one of them?

I get a lot of rueful chuckles with that line. Evidently the OP is onto something with his question.

3

When I asked my wife this question, she said that so much of tech is more efficient, but that tech seems to create more things to do.

4

Well, this one random site says over your lifetime, you’ll waste 4 months waiting for websites to load: Internet Users Waste Over 114 Days of Their Lives Waiting for Websites to Load, Study Finds - Tenscope Blog

For what it’s worth, at my web dev jobs, this is something we do try to measure to some extent. We’ll find slow parts of our app, simulate loading it across different computer & connection speeds, measure the averages, and then multiply that out by our number of users. If it’s bad enough, it might justify diverting more resources towards optimization, which is something that can otherwise be hard to prioritize.

Users (and to some extent developers and designers) like fast apps, but management often doesn’t care. Their productivity (and bonuses tied to it) is often measured in revenue growth, monthly active users, # of major features shipped, etc. Performance is too often an afterthought, because it costs resources without (usually) generating any revenue.

Anecdotally, at one job, I was building a complex solar energy chart with tens of thousands of data points and wanted to spend some time making it faster. Management forbade me from doing that, insisting that I needed to make it as quickly and cheaply as possible. So I did… and made it as un-optimized as possible. It was monstrously slow. Then we demoed it to the rest of the company, who all asked “why is it so slow? how can anyone use it like that?”. Only after that embarrassment was I allowed to spend some time optimizing it. A couple days later and the thing was 10x faster than before.

There are easy wins like that all over the place, and many techniques for making videos smoother and adaptable to connection speeds, pre-buffering and preloading webpages, caching things, etc. Many teams just don’t spend time doing that anymore, especially when they’re all using the fast company fiber network and the latest-gen, super-fast Apple Silicon computers (that boot up in seconds), not the 10-year-old budget Windows computers and 25 Mbps DSL that many of their customers are still on.

Software gets more and more bloated every year, and to some extent hardware gets faster and cheaper (per unit of performance) to match, but not everyone likes to stay on the upgrade treadmill forever. If developers took more care to make things more performant, things wouldn’t have to be so slow. Even 4K video.

Heh, well said.

I especially hate chip card transactions that take like 2 minutes and then fail. What I always say to the cashiers is “technology… can’t live with it, can’t live without it, eh”.

5

That is crazy slow, BTW. My literal 386 from 30 years ago booted faster than that :slight_smile:

Is it a corporate laptop running Active Directory or anything like that (common in bigger companies), where it’s trying to download all your of profile and files across the network every time it boots up…? Can you just put it to sleep/hibernate without turning it off every night?

6

Why ever are you shutting down your computer. :face_with_monocle:
They are much more reliable ( as are Smart Tvs ) if put to sleep rather than turned off. Electronic devices are long lived if kept warm and put to sleep rather than cold started.

Currently on a sleeping Mac laptop there is pretty much zero delays to being functional. Open the screen and by the time it’s open you are functional.
Drive and RAM speeds are insane

My machine has no password needed to start either. Complete waste of time.

7

The shorter punchier version:

If computers are so fast, how come we’re always waiting for them?

8

I’m the typical trained monkey who is happy to use whatever tech, but knows little other than “press these keys/go through these steps/to do xyz.” As I’ve mentioned before, it really throws me to have someone tell me to “reboot” when the computer gives the options to “restart” or “shut down.”

It is a federal government work computer, which I most often use at home. So I press c/a/d, then enter my password, then I press a Cisco icon, then I click 2 buttons that appear - and wait for it to click and whir at those steps. Sometimes I can enter my sign in time as little as 3 minutes after I opened my computer - more often, 4 or 5. Especially if I get distracted and fail to notice immediately when some button pops up that I need to press.

I’m really not interested in what all it is doing - I just want it to allow me to work. The same way I don’t care what all happens when I press start in my car - I just want to be able to drive.

I have asked for and scrupulously follow all sign in/off steps. (And I apologize that “sign in/off” might not be the best terms. I put my computer in the required status when I stop working, and follow express instructions when I wish to begin work the next day.) I am required to “restart” at the end of the day so it sleeps at the cntrl/alt/del window - available for updates. We report our time on-line and are allowed to “backdate” our sign in time up to 5 minutes, acknowledging the slow long on process. Periodically it takes longer than 5 minutes. I have previously posted here asking about folks’ work tech reliability, as I feel ours sucks. But after a career with my agency, I’ve just accepted such inefficiencies as standard.

9

Please realize that to someone who is not in love with their work computer, this is not really a helpful question/statement. I am doing exactly what I have been instructed to do. Whether or not that is appropriately called “shutting down”, I neither know nor care.

BTW - it is a non-Apple PC. I asked our IT guy recently, and he said our computers would be replaced wither this FY or the next.

10

Ah… say no more. I feel bad for you :frowning:

Governments are notorious for this sort of thing. Their tech stuff is usually farmed out to the lowest-bidder IT services that don’t care about their users…

Centralized control & distribution like that will always be slow, and it’s pretty bad at many bigger companies, but still not as bad as in government. You guys seem to get the worst of the worst among end-user experiences, the dredges of hardware and software that nobody in the private sector would want to touch with a 10-year-long pole… sigh.

Yeah…wise decision =/ I don’t think that’s a fight you could ever win, especially with the new administration that cares even less about its workers…

It sucks, and I’m sorry you have to put up with that nonsense :frowning:

There’s absolutely a difference between different types of companies and even among teams/roles within the same company. In terms of startup times, it literally can be the difference between “my laptop is ready before I can even more my hands to the keyboard” and “I have to wait 5-10 minutes before I can even type my password in”.

That’s just a function of corporate bureaucratic controls and their particular implementation of mobile device management; it will be especially bad in bigger companies and governments that like to centrally manage their users and store their profiles (or entire operating system images) in some slow server farm thousands of miles away, downloading it to your computer every time.

Not much you can do about that except switch jobs =/

11

For those of us who remember connecting through dial-up modems and then waiting for sites to slowly load one line at a time and images taking forever and b&w movies taking even longer, the near-instantaneousness of today’s computers is almost as miraculous as the rise in expectations for them. Streaming hi-def color movies!

Everything in life requires time, from boiling water to have a red light turn to green to getting to the front of a grocery line. The few seconds of computer lag is a trivial and almost invisible piece of the pie chart. As someone said upthread we ask computers to do 10,000 times as much processing and connecting and they do it 10,000 times faster. Yet we still complain because humans are now wired that way. I don’t believe this had ever been true in history before about the 20th century. We should revel in our abandon, as Tom Petty sang.

12

For us, it is more than simple slowness. Our individual computers - or our regional or national system - will periodically shut down without warning/explanation. My computer periodically does weird glitches - freezing up and losing information. I’ve reported it and asked if I did anything wrong, but am told nothing can be done. So I just accept some amount of inefficiency - and develop the lowest tech workarounds to minimize any inconvenience.

It is so ridiculous - my office conducts administrative hearings - over 500,000 per year. Most are via phone, but some are in person or via video. What I’m trying to say is that we conduct the exact same type of meeting day in and day out, with the exact same types of participants. But it is not at all infrequent for some technical glitch to interfere with conducting a hearing.

Yes, I appreciate that the technology to conduct and record what is essentially a zoom call would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. But I have no interest in what is involved other than that the hearing take place when it was scheduled. I neither buy nor maintain the equipment. It does result in dissonance, though, when I watch TV/movies (I understand - not real life) and they consistently rely on tech much more advanced than ours under much more challenging circumstances.

13

In my cars, the info screen / touch screen can take a long time to load.

The info screen in my 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee WK2 loaded immediately and its functions could be immediately and quickly invoked.

The info screen in my 2024 Subaru Outback sometimes has lengthy delays of up to 5 seconds. Frustrating! Ridiculous!

When driving, this can be a safety hazard!

IANA computer architect but I think internal registers can be used more efficiently to mitigate this, instead of having to retrieve settings from storage.

14

What do you need the info/touch screen to do? Does the slow load prevent you from driving? Is it just that you have to wait a while before turning on the radio or something?

15

There was once a theory that, as network connections got faster, there would be no need for local storage on a desktop system.

Maybe not even RAM? Anyone remember SUN’s diskless workstations?
Of course that was back in the days when the net connection was proprietory to a particular company

Still, today a lot of applications are written to require resources that need downloaded Internet information. Hence the waiting time.

Software bloat is probably a large part of it too.
I remember the days when a fairly good C compiler could fit in 64K on CP/M.

16

I started my current job in 99. The computers booted up so fast that it was nothing to shut them down at night and restart in the morning. But over the years, I’ve watched the boot up time get longer and longer as new systems and applications are added. Our Municode site was recently improved to the point of aggravation because instead of just downloading the little part you want to see, it downloads the entire County Land Development Code when you open a new window or tab to refer to another section of code.

As far as time wasted waiting on the PC, keep in mind that we “wasted” time in analog before. How many seconds did it take to pull out a book, find the right page and leaf back and forth between the two entries you needed? waiting for the computer sometimes just replaces the analog waiting time with digital waiting.

I remember spending a LOT of time going through microfilm and microfiche looking for old deeds which I can search much faster now that the Clerk of Courts has scanned them all.

17

Thanks. I feel stupid for not having thought of that!

18

Point:

Counterpoint:

Calvin’s line is especially on-point.

19

I remember using X-terminals in the 90s. They were diskless and simple enough that they just used bootp and tftp to load an image, but we had one with a boot ROM, that could self boot and use a modem to dial in.

Later I managed a cluster of diskless systems. That worked well because they all booted from the same image, so management was easier. Puppet, ansible and such make managing large clusters much easier now, but the size of the OS image for a compute node is so small compared to network bandwidth, that I’m not sure any perfomance is gained booting locally.

The Dad’s last line, too, “If we wanted more leisure we’d invent machines that do things less efficiently.” Is pretty good, too.

Lots of the stuff I do is the type of thing where I run a command, batch job, whatever, and it takes some time to complete. There’s a sweet spot of waiting time where it’s short enough I don’t really want to start a different work project, but I’m also not going to sit still and wait for it to finish. The best compute jobs are the ones that leave just enough time to check the Dope before they die with an error.

20

These times never seem to get quicker, because they’re governed by human factors, not by technology. Basically, there’s some length of time that humans are willing to wait. If things happen within that time, it’s fine, and nobody complains. If it takes longer, then people complain, and then people find ways to make it quicker.

It’s like with elevators. No matter how tall the building, it always takes about the same amount of time to get from the bottom floor to the top floor, because that’s what people will put up with.