Swap to SD cards: performance and burnout test

[Neil Graham]

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 10:18 +0100, Sascha Silbe wrote:
> > I don't think it's terribly useful to test memory consuming
> > non-interactive tasks.
> The problem is that the only way to get _comparable_, _repeatable_ 
> numbers is to make the test non-interactive.
Yup, but that's looking where you didn't drop your contact lens because
the light is better over here.

> What's most important to the user is probably going to be the latency 
> (pointer "sluggishness", UI reaction time), though, and I don't have an 
> idea how to test that (still keeping in mind that it needs to be 
> comparable and repeatable).
Simply cannot be done, User interfaces are inherently based around,
well, interfacing with the user.  The user is a component of the system.
You could have a bot that does some automated clicking but you run the
risk of ignoring exactly the data that would be relevant.

The behaviour of the user will change with he speed of the system,
sometimes that change will significantly change the speed of the system.

An example is the user triggering an operation twice because the system
took too long to demonstrate it was responding to the first one.  Even
if the double action is handled gracefully, it makes extra work to
figure out what to do.

When my daughter was younger she would just keep on clicking on supertux
until it appeared, bringing the system to a standstill while it launched
20 copies.