this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”

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[–] hdsrob@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

We have some of this, but it's usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.

We're a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn't available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.

[–] onnekas@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I know this might be unnecessary over engineering but there has to be a way to check when storage is available and wait for that instead of simply waiting for a fixed amount of time and hope that storage is available then.

[–] hdsrob@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

There are calls we could make to query storage availability, but we can't move forward at this particular point without loading the settings, so we need to wait.

We run on a limited number of devices, and know which manufacturers / devices have slow startups, so it's a little less resource intensive to just wait a few ms on those devices than to continually query storage, or handle the missing storage exceptions in a loop (invoking error handlers is generally pretty expensive, and we don't want to log this particular issue).

This is usually at a device reboot in the middle of the night when no one is working, so even a few seconds at startup isn't the end of the world.

Why would you do that instead of polling with retry/backoff?