Of all the feedback I get about WebODM, few people complain about the speed of the software. In fact, the software is often praised for its speed of processing compared to other alternatives.

I care about speed and memory efficiency, a lot. I will go out of my way to avoid bloat and I write software accordingly. But this is not driven by some obsession to keep things lean. Instead, it is a self-imposed constraint dictated by my choice of development hardware.

This machine is from 2017, so it’s almost 8 years old. I run Arch Linux on it, with a very lean installation and use OpenBox as the window manager, to save as many compute resources for actual development tasks.

I purposefully choose to use an old machine for development. In fact, if one cares about speed, choosing a below average machine will guarantee that your software will run fast on most of your users’ computers. I’m the first person to notice bottlenecks, because inefficiencies are immediately brought to my attention when running code on this machine.

Use old machines; make software go vroom.