In the 90s I worked for a retail chain where the CIO proposed to spend millions to upgrade the point-of-sale hardware. The old hardware was only a year old, but the CPU was pegged at 100% on every device and scanning barcodes was very sluggish.
He justified the capex by saying if cashiers could scan products faster, customers would spend less time in line and sales would go up.
A little digging showed that the CIO wrote the point-of-sale software himself in an ancient version of Visual Basic.
I didn't know VB, but it didn't take long to find the loops that do nothing except count to large numbers to soak up CPU cycles since VB didn't have a sleep() function.
He justified the capex by saying if cashiers could scan products faster, customers would spend less time in line and sales would go up.
A little digging showed that the CIO wrote the point-of-sale software himself in an ancient version of Visual Basic.
I didn't know VB, but it didn't take long to find the loops that do nothing except count to large numbers to soak up CPU cycles since VB didn't have a sleep() function.