Where's All My CPU and Memory Gone? The Answer: $5B Worth Slack App (medium.com)

Slack, valued at $5 billion, has received buyout pitches from several companies including Amazon and Microsoft. But the team collaborations service, which has over 5 million active users, continues to offer one of the most resource intensive apps you could find on Mac and iOS. From an article: TLDR; If you care about battery life or availability of your finite CPU and memory on your computer, then you probably won't want to use Slack desktop with more than one or two accounts. Slack resource usage increases linearly as you add more accounts, and it quickly adds up. [...] I noticed that my machine has been sluggish and its battery life has become poor. Whilst investigating this, it turns out that Slack desktop fails badly when used with multiple accounts. This is because CPU and memory usage increases linearly as you add more accounts to your Slack desktop client. As a result, I believe the growing trend to use Slack to be part of multiple communities is seriously flawed until Slack resolve this problem. The author, Matthew O'Riordan, has shared screenshots of Activity Monitor which shows that Slack application on his Mac was consuming more than 1.5GB of memory, and as much as 70 percent of the energy. The company's iOS app instills several more issues.

Comments

Norton and McAfee can use more cpu they should buy

[Joe_Dragon]

Norton and McAfee can use more cpu they should buy this!

This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, Slack is originally based on IRC. And IRC is very resource-intensive. It would be difficult to make an IRC-based chat client that doesn't tax the system.

Re:This is to be expected

[Anubis IV]

There are IRC clients on his platform that perform just fine. I used to regularly use Colloquy on OS X for my IRC needs and I never observed any of the issues the author is describing. Moreover, while Slack basically boils down to a prettified version of IRC, I don't think I've ever seen it suggested that it's "based on IRC" in any way other than in concept. If it shares any internals, I've love more info. After all, I wouldn't mind being able to connect to Slack channels using a standard IRC client.

Re:This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, Slack is originally based on IRC. And IRC is very resource-intensive. It would be difficult to make an IRC-based chat client that doesn't tax the system.

Your an idiot... IRC is super lightweight, slack is heavyweight because it's built on top of electron (aka chromium browser)

Re:This is to be expected

[txsable]

Connect to Slack over IRC and XMPP. I tried this for I while but it was awkward in my experience.

Re: This is to be expected

[Brockmire]

What? Steve Gibson wrote an IRC client in assembly to catch some hackers one time. I don't think it took him long. IRC was popular when we ran 100Mhz Pentium with 64MB Ram. What the fuck are you talking about? Slack has a shit ton more features than any IRC client.

Re: This is to be expected

[Brockmire]

Shit, did I just get whooshed?

Re:This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

My an idiot? Da fuq is this even English?

Re:This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called sarcasm, dumbass.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

What? I've used Pidgin, HexChat, IRSSI, and WeeChat, and I've never seen them use more than 20-50 MB of RAM. I still use them to chat in live streams rather than the web browser because it's that much lighter. I use mpv and youtube-dl to watch streams.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh indeed.

Re: This is to be expected

[aliquis]

Shit, did I just get whooshed?

Don't worry.

The drowned don't suffer any longer.

Re: This is to be expected

[haruchai]

Shit, did I just get whooshed?

Don't worry.

The drowned don't suffer any longer.

What is dead may never die

Re:This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, could this be considered a troll? albeit, a good-natured one.

Seems like you caught a few, well done.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Woooooooooosh

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

64mb of RAM is a lot for a Pentium. 8 or 16mb sounds more appropriate for that era.

Re: This is to be expected

[sexconker]

You got whooshed, yes.
But even writing "Hello World" in assembly takes forever.

Re:This is to be expected

[DontBeAMoran]

IRC is nothing compared to displaying plain ASCII text files.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

10 lines is "forever"?

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

writing the 10 lines takes forever, not the 10 lines themselves.

5 minutes for the first one
20 for the second
3 hours for the third
12 for the fourth
3 days for the fifth
a year for the sixth
7 years for the eighth
a decade for the ninth
and infinite for

Re: This is to be expected

[rholtzjr]

You know, I never really like contractions. It seems that all most of them (at least the ones that are most misused) do is eliminate a single space and a letter. I try and avoid them in written communications. Let's (here's one) (and another) take a look at some of them. Instead of "let us" one would use "let's" Saved space, and time = 1 letter and a space. "Here's" instead of "here is", again same savings.

I am sure there are some like "You're" that increase this time saving (oh wait, yet another single saving), but realistically it would just be better to NEVER use them in the first place. (notice I did not use "I'm" or even "didn't").

Some English and grammar rules just seem...., well..... stupid. And yeah, I know. It must be a boring Thursday for this type of post.

Re: This is to be expected

[bored_engineer]

I see what you mean, but it seems to me that written language follows, rather than leads, spoken language. Speak what you wrote with and without the contractions, and you'll find that (some of) the contractions flow better than the longer form. (I did, though the fourth and fifth sentences were pretty awkward.

Here's an example:

I cannot argue with your assessment that they do not save any significant time, and in the case of "you're" and "it's" are a source of significant confusion.

I can't argue with your assessment that they don't save any significant time, and in the case of "you're" and "it's" are a source of significant confusion.

You remind me of a novel by Janet Kagan called "Hellspark" that I read about 30 years ago. In it, the protagonist alternates her pronunciation of her home planet as "Hellspark" and "Hell's Park." It's a touch I've always liked about her writing, and one that lead me to take notice of contractions.

Re:This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh fucktard

Re: This is to be expected

[rholtzjr]

Yea, that is the bizarre part about the English language. Spoken does not always follow the written. I have condition myself to not use them in writing, however spoken is another story. I sometimes use them unless I am trying to emphasize a point. Such as: "I don't use contractions" in normal speak. And when I want to emphasize that same statement with "I DO NOT use contractions" instead of "I DON'T use contractions".

Ahhh, you have to love the little subtleties of this language.

On a side note you also pointed out another. "Cannot" vs. "Can not" (contraction: can't). Who made the decision on that one? Did they just run out of space on the page for the official definition or was their hand writing so bad that is was interpreted incorrectly? Just another thing that makes you go "Hmmmm".

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

So...

MSG1 DEFM 'Hello World'
DEFB 0D
LD HL,(MSG1)
CALL 0021H

You're all morons!
Stupid IS FOREVER!!

Re: This is to be expected

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You know, I never really like contractions. It seems that all most of them (at least the ones that are most misused) do is eliminate a single space and a letter.

Contractions are not about saving a couple of characters. They're about presenting a more natural form of communication. They're an attempt to portray everyday speech, rather than some stilted kind of English that almost no one actually uses.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that long. I have several lying around here. Of course, it takes a little more effort than in C. Something to do with practice making perfect, I'm sure.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to try more modern messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype Messenger, LINE, and of course Slack. They are much better at making full use of available system resources than those old 1990s apps that you list. And they have emojis. Emojis and GB class RAM usage. That is 2 decades worth of progress right there.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have no origin and/or you are executing data.

Re:This is to be expected

[slashdice]

Yeah, it's like you have a girlfriend and want to have sex but she tells you "I'm saving myself for marriage but you can stick it in my butt *teehee*". It's awkward and smells bad and you can't ever get it in more than an inch so you just end up jacking off all over her ass. Then you find out she's actually a man.

Re: This is to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to terminate your string with a '$' character.

IRC, done poorly.

[0100010001010011]

A while ago I tried to be in a larger facebook group and having more than one window open would grind my machine to a halt. Every single tab wanted it own Ajaxy Chat GUI.

Slack should have just made a pretty GUI on top of the existing IRC protocol. I remember being able to be in dozens of chat rooms on a machine less powerful than a RaspberryPi.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, exactly. It's all about, cool. Function following form, and that kind of thing.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because "old school" code had to be small and efficient, and the programmers needed to know how to do that.

Increasingly, programmers rely on an ever expanding set of tools to do all of the hard work, don't know or care about performance or efficiency, and write bloated messes.

Windows is a fine example of this. Some days, it feels like it runs no faster on a modern multi-core machine with a lot of RAM than it did on an old 386.

Modern software is frequently crap, written with the mantra that "CPU and RAM is cheap, it'll be fine".

Having hand optimized code to fit in small memory footprints or slow CPUs, I question if the average modern programmer has the slightest idea of what it would mean to do that. And once you've had to do it, you keep it in mind forever in terms of "no, that would be a bad idea". I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people write n^2 code which calls n^2 code which calls n^2 code and end up with something which can't possibly work -- all because they don't really know what is happening under the covers.

I've met far too many programmers who say "there's no point in optimizing". Invariably they write shitty, inefficient code which is a monument to "elegance" which they can't even maintain.

I've worked with people who would get a feature request and be like "I can't, I'd have to rebuild the entire thing", or who spend hours trying to figure out how their code works. The old school coders who spent time in C and the like? Pretty much they can open up their code and go "I'd need to tweak here and here, and extend here".

In 1993, my 8MB Linux machine on a 486 positively ran rings around anything else I'd seen.

The average code seems to be built in 10+ frameworks nobody really knows anything about. Software has become bloated trash steadily over the last 25 years.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[tlhIngan]

Finally the truth comes out.

The happiest day was when I could uninstall slack. (Slack is not a corporate standard where I work, however, a project I was on, the customer insisted on using slack). Took me less than a day to figure out why Firefox was consuming 30% of the CPU (slack web pages...) so I installed the app hoping it would be less resource hungry Was I wrong... but at least it wasn't bogging Firefox down

Turned off all the effects so I could at least get some usability out of my PC - it cut CPU usage done somewhat. I come to believe that the slack app is one of those node.js things that embed electron and turn a web app into a native app by running it under Chrome or something.

I know it's got a lot of stuff, but when things like Discord could exist happily on my machine taking 0% most of the time, or in a browser window taking practically no CPU cycles as well, there is no reason Slack has to be so inefficient. We shouldn't need to have Core i7's or top of the line Ryzens just to use a chat app.

Maybe we should replace all their developer PCs with what we can scrounge up at Goodwill

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC didn't have a fleet of emoticons for you to chose from? Think of the emoticons!

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[sexconker]

But mIRC let you slap people around a bit with a large trout.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[DontBeAMoran]

I say we start again from scratch.

Here, I'll help and start with the basic building blocks:
0
1

You're welcome.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to with the vienna sausage between your legs?

Re: IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

But then it wouldn't be worth 5 billion !

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I come to believe that the slack app is one of those node.js things that embed electron and turn a web app into a native app by running it under Chrome or something."

Correct. Well, if you want to be pedantic, it's a JS thing running under Electron, which is essentially "node.js and chromium" fused into one whole. I suspect there is still efficient ways of writing such applications, and I suspect the Slack team don't consider "reducing resource consumption" to be a worthwhile feature.

And it has terrible usability. (Grey on white. Yeah, looks flash but really REALLY hard to read.)

Thankfully, Microsoft Teams is the way we'll go - same approach of running on Electron, but hopefully Microsoft developers are more resource friendly than Slack's. Can't believe I've hit a point where I believe it's possible MS would be more resource efficient than another company, but it actually has happened.. (because $WORK already has Office 365 Esomething and Azure AD, Teams with Single Sign On is borderline trivial to deploy; and I think it's easier for non-I.T. types to understand with its notion of Teams and Channels within Teams)

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Entropius]

At one point I had to use Windows Update to download a new version of the "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable" which, for whatever reason, there are 23492834 versions of.

This was on a computer with an i7-6700K, a SSD, 16GB RAM, and fast internet.

It took four hours. I have no fucking clue what that machine was doing during that time.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an aside, I do kinda wish someone would port Electron to run on Chakra/Edge - it might not be faster but it would take less resource on W10. looks like it started, but nothing much happening since 2016. (Basically, use as much as the host OS has to replace the need for Node.JS/V8/Electron as much as possible -- e.g., use Edge instead of Chromium if you don't need it)

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[0100010001010011]

/me understands this reference.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

and who said there wasnt a god. if god wanted us to use pictures instead of words, we wouldnt have mouths. 7 bit ascii ftw.

Re: IRC, done poorly.

[jimbo]

Well, Somebody require fully functional app with "acceptable" number of bugs in record time, made cheaply you use high level frameworks and shit on memory and CPU resources.

I've been using Atom recently and it's a bloated whale (not to mention that they think they can call something without macro recording a programmers editor). I wish Electron would just go away.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Khyber]

It was searching for other competing shit it could surreptitiously wipe from your system.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Discord uses Chromium Embedded Framework, which is just as bad as Electron, they can both go to hell as far as I'm concerned.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Increasingly, programmers rely on an ever expanding set of tools to do all of the hard work, don't know or care about performance or efficiency, and write bloated messes.

I've had other programmers remove optimized code because "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Despite the fact that had been optimized because I had run a profiler over the code and verified that it was a bottleneck.

Nope.

Optimization is evil. Don't do it.

Also once had a five line loop ripped out and replaced with a 2MB library, because "we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[TheRaven64]

Increasingly, programmers rely on an ever expanding set of tools to do all of the hard work, don't know or care about performance or efficiency, and write bloated messes.

There's nothing wrong with using tools. If there's a well-written library that does something, then you can focus on the things that you're an expert in and allow people who are experts in something else to optimise their library. The problem is that programmers are increasingly bad at judging the quality of the libraries that they use.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[drinkypoo]

I still prefer docow. epic+wctb 4ever

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Lord_Jeremy]

You undoubtedly were bitten by the ages old Windows 7 bug/feature where Windows Update has to reindex some idiotic database with dependency graphs for every update. It's one of the reasons why if you make a new install of Windows 7, it'll take something approaching 24 hours to download the update to windows update, the next update to windows update, the update to the reindexer, reindex, then then 500+ updates after SP1, etc...

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Lord_Jeremy]

A couple months ago, the Slack team released an update with significantly curbed memory usage on macOS, perhaps other platforms. Evidently there were some nasty bugs in their code that would result in gigabytes of leaked or wasted memory after a few days of use. TFA was almost certainly written after this memory usage reduction patch, and of course the performance characteristics are still absolutely terrible.

This whole issue is amusing to me because with the past couple days there was another Slashdot headline, an attack piece bashing Apple for not adopting "Progressive Web Apps." The Slack app's awful performance is an example of why this desktop web app concept is evil.

In my day job, I'm the CTO at a small business that develops cross-platform desktop apps for configuring and hardening mobile devices. Aside from the necessity to use a USB driver to communicate with these devices, in the course of normal usage our application has to open 3 or 4 TCP connections simultaneously to different API services on the devices. We write very tight code because any overhead is multiplied when our users connect 20 or even 50 devices for simultaneous configuration. At full tilt, our applications will probably be running more threads than the Apache install serving you this site :P

I can't imagine how much we'd FUBAR the system if my team had started in Node.JS + Electron or whatever the hip web app framework is. We do the bulk of our interactive UI in a web view to make the cross-platform support easier and so a less expensive team can handle the UI. Experienced C++ engineers have their cost, but they're worth it when you need really great-performing software. As it is, will still use nowhere near as much memory or CPU time at idle as Slack. At load, our CPU usage can get crazy but our memory usage will almost never break 200MB. (I just double-checked. Idle, our desktop app alone uses 20MB and with the web view loaded it goes up to 70MB. Slack, with it's 5 little helpers is currently using 1.5GB on my Mac.) On top of that, our app is 30MB on disk and that includes shipping dependencies like OpenSSL, boost, and sqlite. Slack is more than 5 times that size, with the bulk of it being the Electron Helper Framework. Nice...

Re: IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Visual Studio Code, it seems much faster and responsive than Atom does.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be difficult,
Dell pays Goodwill huge money to scrap every single computer that gets donated.
It's literally "Cash for Clunkers" all over again, at least in Arizona.

The most I've ever seen is a Motherboard and crappy old DDR1 on the shelves, right next to the torn up iomega ZIP drives and shitty CenturyLink DSL modems.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[mink]

Peace and Protection was one of the best scripts for mIRC.

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[samwichse]

hunter2

Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

We have to use Slack at work (because people that think it's cool said we do), and it's such a resource hog it isn't funny. I've disabled every feature and blocked animated images and it's still annoying.
You can connect with pidgin if you want a semi-functional version of it, but the XMPP support is missing critical things, like when someone opens a new group chat with you (you won't see it).
I would love for it die, but I know that won't happen.

Re:Not surprised

[tlhIngan]

We have to use Slack at work (because people that think it's cool said we do), and it's such a resource hog it isn't funny. I've disabled every feature and blocked animated images and it's still annoying.
You can connect with pidgin if you want a semi-functional version of it, but the XMPP support is missing critical things, like when someone opens a new group chat with you (you won't see it).
I would love for it die, but I know that won't happen.

I'm thankful it's not corporate standard here, though some people want it to be. (I have invites to the "official unofficial corporate slack network"). And I told our IT admin to resist calls to get everyone on slack (seriously, I think at least 3-4 different people created 3-4 different corporate slack accounts)

Bleh.

Re:Not surprised

[Orphis]

I just used the IRC bridge at work instead, it worked alright, but I don't remember using the group chat feature at all, we just had regular channels.

Node.js & Chromium

[tonique]

Fide Wikipedia:

Slack: Written in Electron

[Electron] allows for the development of desktop GUI applications using front and back end components originally developed for web applications: Node.js runtime for the backend and Chromium for the frontend

The beginning does promise lots of memory usage already...

Re:Node.js & Chromium

[theurge14]

Just like Atom.

Reminds me of "Write once, run slowly everywhere."

Re:Node.js & Chromium

[aliquis]

Reminds me of "Write once, run slowly everywhere."

To be fair for most JAVA applications it was:
Write once; don't get used anywhere.

Re:Node.js & Chromium

[scdeimos]

Oh, it's better than that. I once complained to Slack support about its tendency to slurp up CPU and RAM on the system. They said it launches a new instance of Chromium for every channel you subscribe to, but that they were working on improving its resource usage.

Reinventing the wheel

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC is never going away.

Easy Fix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use Slack. There are countless chat applications available, including free and open source ones. Most of them are not resource intensive.

sadly

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't even a matter of it being a bloated web app on Electron. It's just a badly written bloated web app on Electron.

Re:sadly

[mrbester]

Yep. Compare and contrast Visual Studio Code.

For a moment I got scared

[future assassin]

and thought something bad and corporate happened to Slack aka Slackware.

Re:For a moment I got scared

[MangoCats]

AlienBob got fired...

Re: For a moment I got scared

[Anonymous Coward]

I did too for a second. The title needs to be renamed. We Linux users also say "Slack."

Re: For a moment I got scared

[Anonymous Coward]

No one cares, linturd.

Re:For a moment I got scared

[Anonymous Coward]

The Church has an app worth $5B? Praise "Bob"!

[Tap here to pull the wool over your own eyes]

Re:For a moment I got scared

[rtb61]

I am a slacker and I recognise slack it is software for slackers. Make it look like you are really busy and contributing but in reality you are just slacking off and playing the corporate social media game. I am the other kind of slacker, manage yourself to be far more productive so as to increase slack time. This software is bad, chews up productivity to fill it with empty make busy work, gets socially effective manipulative douche bags promoted and the real productive people fired because they are not playing the slack corporate social media game well.

Security issues also scream out loud. Why the fuck would you share your company interactions with outside based upon their claims of security. No wonder M$ the number one privacy invasive douche bags of the digital age want a piece of slack.

M$ Teams Has the Same Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The number one application by resource usage on my system is Microsoft Teams. I don't know why these chat programs are so poorly written.

The memory obesity problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem: Modern coders get taught hipster programming languages instead of traditional programming languages that were made back when there was memory conservatism in place.All programmers that know document.write() as their first hello world should be replaced by those who learned printf() instead.

Re:The memory obesity problem.

[fisted]

Now now, why use the heavyweight printf for hello world when you have no formatting and might as well use puts instead?

Kids these days.

Now get off my lawn.

Wait, what?!

[Anonymous Coward]

A company worth $5B can still offer shitty software??? Quick, tell Microso....oh wait, they already tried to buy them....

oh boy yes!

[citylivin]

i hate slack. It copies to the machine like your entire history in every conversation, including all media. Most people here, there appdata slack folder is like 1.5gb and growing all the time. And we have only been using the software for a year, when someone decided that we had to adopt this fad.

And its all just animated gifs and useless other crap.

I hate slack, and i dont understand why people can't just use email for communication. Instant messaging made sense in the days of ICQ when email servers often took 15 minutes to relay messages. But now with exchange active sync and push emails it seems unnecessary to me.

To me, the people that like slack, are the ones that want you to respond to every little thing ASAP and they see it as a way to force people to respond quicker. Only thing is that this manic quickness destroys the mind, trains of thought, and makes it very hard to concentrate on project work when you are being distracted constantly by "chatters" (or i suppose, slackers). At least with email there is an expectation that you may take an hour or two to read it. That expectation goes away with IM clients, psychologically. For some personality types, this is a positive, and those personality types are sadly winning out.

I blame phone culture personally, but i certainly had younger friends in the ICQ days who would send 10 messages for every one response you made. Each one getting more and more desperate for a connection. Sad that the world has moved more and more in this direction, as reasoned responses take time to generate.

Re:oh boy yes!

[langelgjm]

At my company, Slack fosters an "always-on" culture that fosters the expectation that people should always immediately respond to any request (even when not at work), and in my case, takes away from the ability to sustain focus on any complex problem for more than a few minutes. It's terrible, and I hate it.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

At my company, Slack fosters an "always-on" culture that fosters the expectation that people should always immediately respond to any request (even when not at work), and in my case, takes away from the ability to sustain focus on any complex problem for more than a few minutes. It's terrible, and I hate it.

We've actually been asked to install in on our personal phones as well as our workstations so that we can keep up with what is going on at work when we're not there.
I shit you not.
No, I'm not salary and I'm not paid to be on call.
I'm not talking to people at work all day long when I'm not punched in, and I work 3rd shift so you KNOW they will be talking when I'm off work.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Wraithlyn]

Email is not optimal at back-and-forth *group* conversations, where Slack excels.

this manic quickness destroys the mind

This is a weird complaint. If someone chats with you in person, or you have an in-person meeting, does this immediacy "destroy your mind"? Email still has its place but sometimes you just need to have a quick chat about something.

makes it very hard to concentrate on project work when you are being distracted constantly by "chatters" (or i suppose, slackers)

Found the problem. Turn off notifications except for messages specifically mentioning you, and learn to ignore Slack when you're busy.

All of the above being said, Slack is a big fat resource hog and deserves all the criticism it gets for that. But group-focused messaging platforms have value.

Re:oh boy yes!

[maliqua]

This is a weird complaint. If someone chats with you in person, or you have an in-person meeting, does this immediacy "destroy your mind"? Email still has its place but sometimes you just need to have a quick chat about something.

Do you have meetings every 30 seconds for an hour that last 2 seconds each?

Re:oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is not optimal at back-and-forth *group* conversations, where Slack excels.

This is false. Take any group of people who can communicate clearly and effectively in a manner that respects other people's time, and email is just as good as Slack. If you have a problem with communicating via email, you aren't going to solve it with Slack.

Found the problem. Turn off notifications except for messages specifically mentioning you, and learn to ignore Slack when you're busy.

A real "let them eat cake" sentiment. The entire point of Slack is so that people who need an immediate response to their every mental twitch have an "efficient" way of getting it. Subscribe only to specific mentions and they will skyrocket. Worse, you will be forced to backtrack through the same threads you were trying to ignore to figure out wtf the question is about. Turn off all notifications, and you will get people all over your phone line and email account demanding to know whether you saw their question on Slack.

Re: oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf ? I hate email that turns into a conversation. Let's just have a ... Wait for it ... conversation.

Emails should be replied to whenever.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is not optimal at back-and-forth *group* conversations,

USENET is very good for this, and email-lists work very well for this, and loose email still works acceptably well for this... provided you know how to use it.

That means NO TOP POSTING. It means interleaved quoting and on-topic comments for each quoted bit, and leave the rest out. It means being your own worst editor, and so spending that tiny extra bit of time and effort to re-read what you wrote, answering the question "do I want to share this with the world?"

It also means sitting down and thinking for a bit, to come up with an actual question, maybe some sub-questions neatly separated in paragraphs. You need to structure your thoughts around the question a bit, see if you can't come up with a question that's actually meaningful and answerable.

If not, you have some more thinking to do. Instead of, you know, wasting other people's time trying to come up with a question that someone somewhere might be able to answer. Given that any disturbance of the flow takes at least 15 minutes to recover from, this simple filter is a huge productivity preserver.

And for "modern day" issue "warm body" seat-filling office-stuffing, these simple things are incredibly hard. Because you don't get fancy forms that pre-format everything for you. You have to actually sit down and write, instead of insert-foot-echo-internationally. You have to have some modicum of basic skill that is evidently not taught anywhere these days. Not even in open source communities.

where Slack excels.

Never used it. IRC does the chatroom thing fine, and comes with a wide choice of clients, most of which are not resource hogs. I have it open all the time on a variety of topics, and now and then I chip in. So why yet another reinvention of mature tech?

I'm thinking the only real appeal of slack is its hipster factor. I gather this from looking at who use it, especially the people who use it and complain the least, apparently liking the thing.

this manic quickness destroys the mind

This is a weird complaint. If someone chats with you in person, or you have an in-person meeting, does this immediacy "destroy your mind"?

It's not a weird complaint if you take it to mean "disrupts your state of 'flow'". 'Flow' is that state of deep concentration where you get actual work done. "Instant messengers" and chatroom apps with notifications, even windows' popups and notifications and whatnots, and of course clippy, are very good at destroying 'flow'. (My IRC client doesn't notify, nor does it even highlight. This is on purpose.)

All of the above being said, Slack is a big fat resource hog and deserves all the criticism it gets for that. But group-focused messaging platforms have value.

So why is this Johnny-come-lately chatroom "app" worth five billion dollahs? Has the dollah declined that much in value?

Re:oh boy yes!

[langelgjm]

f someone chats with you in person, or you have an in-person meeting, does this immediacy "destroy your mind"?

Um, yes? I can't the stand the constant "Got a minute?" questions, where someone walks up to your desk and interrupts whatever you're doing (thanks, open floor plans). Or a string of meetings with a half hour or hour between each, so that you don't really have enough time to get into a flow in between.

Re:oh boy yes!

[enjar]

And its all just animated gifs and useless other crap.

If you are using this for work, you can establish a policy for professional communication that keeps things on topic and excludes animated gifs.

I hate slack, and i dont understand why people can't just use email for communication.

Slack (and other things like it) allow group conversations to happen where new group members can be added to the conversation and see all the history and discussion. This group discussion remains as a artifact to be referred to later by others who may find it useful. For example, marketing and development may discuss a new feature in a group chat to clarify details and let work start, or clarify points in a spec/user story. If more devs are added to the team they can review the discussion easily. When QEs need clarification they can refer to the discussion, and then also people who write documentation and tech support can use it as a source for customer questions or writing doc. When someone later comes along and doesn't like the feature, you can point them at similar discussions. If you tried the same thing in email, the conversation just dies and you need to re-hash it or find the people who participated. With slack, you just have the record there and anyone who has access can find it.

To me, the people that like slack, are the ones that want you to respond to every little thing ASAP and they see it as a way to force people to respond quicker.

That happens on email, too. It happened with voice mail. It happened with the land line telephone and written messages. It happened with postal mail -- "respond ASAP" is not a technology thing, it's a human thing.

At least with email there is an expectation that you may take an hour or two to read it.

No, not unless your workplace has that explicitly called out. People send me an email and call minutes later wanting to know why I haven't responded.

I blame phone culture personally,

Sad that the world has moved more and more in this direction, as reasoned responses take time to generate.

That's a trend that's been going on since the dawn of human history. It's not a Slack problem. Slack is a tool, like a phone, email, telegram or roll of paper attached to a bird's foot.

Re:oh boy yes!

[enjar]

I heard the exact same complaint about email 20 years ago, and co-incident with effectively dealing with office interruptions. It's not a Slack problem, it's a people/culture problem. You can find books written decades ago that are filled with effective techniques to manage interruptions and work/life balance, as twenty years ago there were people staying late at work, who were emailing at all hours and expecting responses. You can work (meaning take some leadership) to establish reasonable boundaries, you can accept it as-is, or you can find work in an organization that values "off hours" from work. In my fifteen years on the current job, I've *never* been told I need to be on call 24/7, that I was expected to answer email outside working hours or that I should call in on vacation. Probably one of the reasons why I keep working here.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Wraithlyn]

No. And I don't have people bothering me on Slack every 2 minutes either.

If you have people bothering you every 2 minutes, that's the problem. Not the medium.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Wraithlyn]

Yes, there are other group communication protocols. So why has Slack taken off? (If your analysis is really, "uhh... hipsters" sorry but you're a fucking idiot) Because Slack has a great UI, and is very easy to use. It's really that simple.

Do you really think you're going to get everyone at a company using USENET or IRC? Seriously? EVERYONE, not just the techies.

Tech geeks tend to downplay the value of ease-of-use and good UX, because they'll happily wallow in a complex UI and tinker with configurations and setup. The vast majority of people just want something easy that works. Slack fits the bill.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Wraithlyn]

So you're incapable of thinking on your feet or holding a conversation? If this were actually true you'd be completely unemployable.

Carving out time for uninterrupted work is of course important. If you have challenges with this where you work I suspect Slack is not the real problem.

Re:oh boy yes!

[langelgjm]

I'm incapable of simultaneously holding a conversation and performing complex, detail-oriented work (as are most people, "multitasking" isn't really a thing). Slack is a real problem, but it's not the only problem. My complaint with Slack is that it further encourages a workplace culture of interruption and immediacy that is largely antithetical to solving difficult problems.

Re:oh boy yes!

[langelgjm]

Agreed, it's not is if Slack causes these problems by itself. But in my workplace, it's an additional medium that encourages a culture of immediacy and interruption. Slack did not create that culture (I received "urgent" e-mails before Slack and I still get them after Slack), but now instead of N ways to interrupt me, people now have N+1 ways.

In my fifteen years on the current job, I've *never* been told I need to be on call 24/7, that I was expected to answer email outside working hours or that I should call in on vacation. Probably one of the reasons why I keep working here.

You're fortunate. At my current job, I've set strict limits with my coworkers - I don't have any push notifications turned on, I refuse to install Slack on my personal phone, and I don't check e-mail when I'm not at work or on weekends. However, I'm probably the only person at my company who behaves this way, and it gets noticed and called out as being "inflexible".

Re:oh boy yes!

[enjar]

At my current job, I've set strict limits with my coworkers - I don't have any push notifications turned on, I refuse to install Slack on my personal phone, and I don't check e-mail when I'm not at work or on weekends. However, I'm probably the only person at my company who behaves this way, and it gets noticed and called out as being "inflexible".

Sounds like time to start looking for alternative employment. There are plenty of employers out there that don't expect 24/7 availability, or who compensate accordingly if they do. If it's quite literally the whole company steeped in this culture it's probably not worth the pain and hassle of fighting it -- find something better.

Re:oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends how often my office mates are getting up for coffee, bathroom, etc. How is this any different from normal office interactions except YOU ARE IN CONTROL of who gets your attention?

Re:oh boy yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

And its that this ease of use extends to integrating a ton of 3rd party tools into it too!

Re:oh boy yes!

[Wraithlyn]

It encourages communication.

You're talking about needing isolation.

Requiring isolation to concentrate on your job does not mean communication is bad.

Re:oh boy yes!

[langelgjm]

No one's saying communication is bad. I am saying that an expectation of constant availability and immediate responsiveness, which conflicts with having any periods of sustained focus, is bad for jobs that require sustained focus.

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[vtcodger]

Where has all MY cpu gone? Ironically, about three hours ago, I noticed that my PC seemed sluggish. Fired up top. Opera is taking 25-30% of the cpu. What's Opera looking at? You guessed it, Slashdot. Killed the Slasdot tab. Opera usage dropped to under 1%.

Poor Multiple Group Support

[Feneric]

In general Slack's support for being members of multiple groups seems to be poor. Basically it looks like it doesn't have the concept of a single user simultaneously being members of multiple groups, and duplicates everything. It's particularly painful for 2FA.

Slack Desktop

[Junior Samples]

What is Slack Desktop and why would I want it?

Re:Slack Desktop

[CoolCash]

I would rather have 1 slack app open, then 10 browser tabs open.

Re:Slack Desktop

[DarkRookie]

Custom Chrome browser and you don't. I has Chromes feature of eating your proc and RAM.

Re:Slack Desktop

[silas_moeckel]

Especially when it has a semi functional xmpp gateway to use a real chat app with.

Re:Slack Desktop

[freeze128]

Your question is more appropriate than you think. I remember seeing commercials on TV for a new product called "Slack". It consisted of an office building populated by CGI anthropomorphic animals. The voice over was saying something about "when you have a creative idea and you want to get it to market as fast as possible"... It wasn't at all clear what Slack was or what it did. The office animals noticed rain clouds and then started to deliver umbrellas to the people on the street via parachute.

Brilliant marketing.

Re:Slack Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignorance is bliss! Just be happy you don't know.

Re:Slack Desktop

[coofercat]

Slack is an instant messenger style 'chat' app, primarily aimed at business user, although they also gently court 'groups', such as open source projects and whatnot. It has some nifty features, such as chat history (even when you're not logged on), private/public groups, private chats, bots for many popular apps and easy developer integration APIs (so it's super easy to have your monitoring system write messages on alerts, for example). Conversations can have media in them (pictures, videos, file attachments, etc) as well as threads.

Slack can be accessed in a variety of ways, but the main ones are a web app, or 'thick client' on the desktop. The desktop app looks and behaves almost exactly the same as the webapp, primarily because it (seems to) share code between the two.

The webapp is fairly complex, and as such does work the browser pretty hard. People have reported it using up a lot of CPU/memory in the browser, particularly if left running for a long time, or when used with multiple accounts (eg. work + and open source project or two). Further, the desktop app also suffers from CPU/memory bloat under similar circumstances. Personally, I've found it to be horrible when using the new voice chat calling feature too.

As geeks, we're looking at a (simple) chat tool and wondering why it's so horribly inefficient. Ostensibly, "it's just IRC", which is, on many levels true, but that does somewhat over-simplify the service somewhat, although none of that justifies it having such a huge system-footprint.

Going further, the Slack company is potentially going to be bought for lots of money by one of the existing big tech companies. Many argue "it's just IRC + some toys", which as before isn't entirely wrong, but over-simplifies what the company is. The company has lots of customers, each paying small or large amounts of money, and so that customer-base is responsible for a significant part of the company's supposed value.

Slack seems to be a little like marmite - you either love it or hate it. Personally, I rather like it - it does what I need and mostly keeps out of the way when I want it to. However, I take the criticism that you can spend hours/days just being 'nagged' rather than actually doing any real work, although that's probably true of any reasonably successful chat app. I'm also a fan of it because so many other tools exist and yet are far, far worse to work with. For example, right now I can chat on Lifesize (incredibly terrible, to the point of unusability), Skype for Business (awful for more than just pinging someone to see if they're calling soon), Microsoft Teams (awful too - very hard to keep more than one conversation going, and even then it's not easy) and I've also got Telegram - which is okay for 'text message' type conversations, but I'm not sure I'd like to use it to argue out why X is better than Y. So on that sense, Slack does quite well ;-)

So what you're saying...

[MachineShedFred]

So what you're saying is that Slack's resource utilization increases linearly as you add more accounts to your Slack desktop client? But does it increase linearly as you add more accounts?

(for the sarcasm impaired, the summary is basically the same sentence repeated)

Static binaries?

[Nutria]

But I thought that modern OSs figured out how to share even them in RAM.

Hey, an app that uses more resources than Firefox!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Firefox set the bar too low for RAM usage and the Firefox developers should add a couple more memory leaks just to be sure.

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try MyCleanPC?

WTF? This is an IRC client and a few bots at most!

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus H! People want to buy slack as a company? Wow, simply just wow.

and IRC server and a couple of bots would sort most of this out. (And fuck the gifs)

Really?

[U8MyData]

Bwah-ha-ha-ah!!! Boy, do we know this one.

Re: Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your hacker just wants to make sure there is no evidence. That's all. System cleaners aren't that effective in speeding up a computer, but they market it that way. Most people can achieve the same result by just restarting their computer.

Fuck this hipster shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC for life.

React & Electron

[Midnight Thunder]

Slack is written in React and uses Electron. I suspect the version of the Google's V8 JavaScript engine being used does not benefit from some of the more recent optimisations used by the one in Chrome 57?

I would be curious to see what could be done to improve things?

Re:React & Electron

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be curious to see what could be done to improve things?

just use an old staple called IRC, and clients that have done the job for *ages* e.g. irssi, mirc, weechat. these are already text based and shaves or skims off the cruft

Re:React & Electron

[Anonymous Coward]

Not running an entire fucking browser process just to display chat messages would be a good start.

Re:React & Electron

[MSG]

Chrome's JS memory improvements landed in 55. The current version of Electron is build on 56, so they're probably included.

Electron apps are a resource nightmare, as is Chrome itself. My wife is in a school for (mostly web) development. Her system tends to run 3 apps: Chrome, Atom, and Slack, so essentially three copies of Chrome. 8GB of RAM is simply not enough to run a text editor, a chat client, and a web browser. That's insane.

Re:React & Electron

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they need enough browser to render all the in-line content types Slack supports, so that might have something to do with why they just took their webapp and stuck it in an app wrapper.

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

People managed to do multiple chat rooms when 2400 baud was hot shit and their PC had 1/10 the processing power and memory of a modern one dollar SoC embedded controller... Fast forward 30 years and other people have apparently managed to create a multi-room chat system that is apparently capable of bringing systems with literally ten thousand times more processing power, memory and network bandwidth than ye olden PC-AT and acoustic modem to their knees.

I assume this is a conspiracy by battery manufacturers to make us buy more replacement batteries, because it's impossible to be that farking stupid by accident, isn't it?

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

An app ran over my dog, you sick fuck.

Developer Laziness

[Anonymous Coward]

This is part the fault of developer laziness and part the fault of Agile.

Between the two, we're pushed towards higher and higher levels of abstraction to make things faster and easier for developers, but more and more terrible for users.

Compile "Hello World" on a modern platform and you get megabytes of code, libraries, and other unnecessaries that add up to astonishingly inefficient use of resources. But, it makes development fast and cheap, and hardware resources are basically infinite, RIGHT?

Re:Developer Laziness

[Ash-Fox]

Compile "Hello World" on a modern platform and you get megabytes of code, libraries, and other unnecessaries that add up to astonishingly inefficient use of resources.

I don't with Visual Studio C++ or C#, Java or GCC/G++ either?

Explain.

Re:Developer Laziness

[JaredOfEuropa]

There are a couple of separate issues there. Agile per se doesn't push for a higher level of abstraction, not does it necessarily result in poorer outcomes for users. That's on the team, not the method.

Hello world results in megabytes of code on many modern platforms, but for more complex programs the overhead might be a lot less, percentage-wise. Couple of MB extra, more CPU cycles because the code isn't optimized isn't always a poor tradeoff either. A complex algorithm that hasn't been optimized might be a lot more readable, easier to debug, easier to maintain.

Fast and cheap development doesn't necessarily mean shitty products. The use of good, widely used and well tested libraries means faster, cheaper and better. A high level of abstraction and the use of libraries allow developers to do more in less time. And developer time is a scarce resource that has to be managed properly just like any other.

Re:Developer Laziness

[Anonymous Coward]

For Java, you've ignored the libraries you'll use once, just for that app. You've also ignored the tens of megabytes of runtime state. Size of the binary is the least important size - flash and disk are large and cheap. RAM is expensive and can't expand.

Re:Developer Laziness

[Ash-Fox]

For Java, you've ignored the libraries you'll use once, just for that app.

But it was the same in the 90s.

You've also ignored the tens of megabytes of runtime state.

Still same in the 90s, none of it is included with the application.

Size of the binary is the least important size

But you said:

you get megabytes of code, libraries, and other unnecessaries that add up to astonishingly inefficient use of resources

The code isn't "megabytes", there isn't unnecessary libraries being called by my code.

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your dog was a LUDDITE! If it apped apps it would not have faced its appy death!

Apps!

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I started using the 64 bit version of Firefox on my Windows PC I've not had nearly as much problem with it monopolizing the CPU(s). Admittedly, every few days when its memory usage gets over 10GB I tend to restart it just because it seems like a browser shouldn't use more than 10GB of memory!

A less resource intensive client...

[Parker Lewis]

In the time Slack has not a Linux client, I've created a similar client using qtwebkit for Linux: https://github.com/raelgc/scud.... It was a bit popular, then Slack released the official client, and I thought that my simple client was dead. For my surprise, it's still alive for all people complaining about resources.

Sure, still a web container running the web version with desktop integration, but at least is using directly a web engine, not an entire browser. The reason is because Slack has no messaging API at all.

Two downsides: Slack keep changing their JS all the time, so it's a cat and mouse game. And qtwebkit itself keep breaking small stuff, so, last month I got 2 major issues: Arch Linux got the newest qtwebkit version, and it was crashing with a dump, not even a python stack (fix was downgrade. Ubuntu 16.04 faced the opposite: Slack upgraded their CSS and qwebkit version included in Ubuntu 16.04 was no more properly rendering the CSS (I pointed people to a package that upgraded 16.04 webkit.

I contacted Slack at least 2 times offering helping on Linux as a volunteer, as their client is just a "compiled" JS and I told them I can: fix some issues, help testing and improve integration with major Linux desktops, but most of the times I have no answer or the traditional "we appreciate, but no".

Re:A less resource intensive client...

[mi]

Seconded. I am a happy ScudCloud user too — there is no "native" Slack app for FreeBSD. It is resource intensive too, but not so bad — using 1.7Gb for one account.

Which reminds me, I really should add the port I created...

Re:A less resource intensive client...

[Parker Lewis]

Feel free to create a PR with the changes you need or join as a contributor!

Re:A less resource intensive client...

[mi]

Feel free to create a PR

Why, thank you kindly for your generous permission...

Re:A less resource intensive client...

[kimhanse]

Reply to undo wrong moderation

Javascript being Javascript

[Gravis Zero]

If Javascript devs can be honest with themselves for a minute then they will realize that this is the result of using Javascript to make applications. Simply put, Javascript was never intended to be used for making applications and poor performance is a reflection of that reality. I'm certain they could optimize it but the overhead compared to a native application is absurd. Don't give me that "Javascript is one languages for all platforms" line either because C++/Qt works on just as many platforms.

Re:Javascript being Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, as long as you add a lot of CSS and some extra frameworks, it's awesome!

Re:Javascript being Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that Javascript is responsible for the bloat in Slack tells me a lot about your high level of ignorance of the matter.

Javascript (a programming language) doesn't cause bloat by itself - the browser engine and how it is used causes the bloat. The browser isn't the most efficient platform to develop on, but it is sandboxed fairly well, and offers a wealth of media, network, layout and more features too numerous to list here. It's also widely used by millions of developers to produce run-practically-anywhere applications.

if Slack were a stripped-down text-only experience, and there would be no bloat, but you would still try to blame Javascript for something.

Re:Javascript being Javascript

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, this is what happens when developers insist on using the only tools they know instead of investing the time and effort required to learn and use the most appropriate tools for the actual job at hand.

So, as I understand it, instead of biting the bullet and simply creating an actual native app, web developers created an entire new framework more or less consisting of an entire browser (and one not known for being easy on resources to begin with) and it's Javascript interpreter, all so they could continue to use Javascript and pretend the whole thing is a "native" application.

Insanity.

Re:Javascript being Javascript

[tlhIngan]

Yep, this is what happens when developers insist on using the only tools they know instead of investing the time and effort required to learn and use the most appropriate tools for the actual job at hand.

So, as I understand it, instead of biting the bullet and simply creating an actual native app, web developers created an entire new framework more or less consisting of an entire browser (and one not known for being easy on resources to begin with) and it's Javascript interpreter, all so they could continue to use Javascript and pretend the whole thing is a "native" application.

I don't mind it, people will write inefficient code anyways on whatever platform they use. It's not hard to write a native app that consumes 100% CPU and gigs of RAM, and I wouldn't expect the native version of the Slack app to be any better.

The problem is it's inefficient in general. It doesn't matter if you just use the web browser version of Slack or the "app" version of Slack - they both are resource hogs. I only went with the app version because I didn't want Firefox to be so sluggish and more crash worthy - better to have an isolated app crash than the entire Firefox crashing.

You can write nice apps - like I said, Discord is the same - you can use the web page, or the app (which I think is also an embedded web browser). And it consumes 0% CPU in general. Yes, the memory usage is higher than a true native app, but in general it's doesn't appear to poll and plays nicely with my PC

It's just the Slack web app itself is inefficient on resources.

And I'd rather the developers use tools they know well than try to code in an environment they don't. Too many WTF's are created when developers code for a platform they are inexperienced with.

Well Trump

[future assassin]

you cared enough to reply.

Re:Well Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Took 2 seconds to reply. Takes more effort to fart.

Re:Well Trump

[future assassin]

Its still an effort that shows you care enough to to post first and then fart.

Re:Well Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, brah. Must make you pretty mad that I and no obe else cares about your Linturd whinefest.

Re: Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a joke, guy with ass burgers.

Task Manager add-on might help

[Picodon]

In those situations, I use the Task Manager third-party add-on to find out the culprit. In my experience, the cause of CPU hogging is often one of the several add-ons I use with Firefox. Saving the session and restarting often cures the ailment, though I sometimes find that I have to close specific pages (weird interaction of combination of pages and add-ons).

Not just Javascript being Javascript

[mi]

If Javascript devs can be honest with themselves for a minute then they will realize that this is the result of using Javascript to make applications.

I don't think, it is fair to single out JavaScript developers in particular...

Per Moore's law, today's computers are 1024 times faster than 15 years ago. Is the "user experience" that much better? It is not. Maybe, it is 10 times better: voice recognition almost works, graphics are better, apps are smarter. But nowhere near 1000-fold improvement. Because the developers "ate" most of the gains in hardware using it for their own convenience instead of that of the end-users.

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

If Javascript devs can be honest with themselves for a minute then they will realize that this is the result of using Javascript to make applications.

I don't think, it is fair to single out JavaScript developers in particular...

. . .

Because the developers "ate" most of the gains in hardware using it for their own convenience instead of that of the end-users.

Especially JavaScript developers.

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers cost software shops money, customers buying faster computers they probably would anyways because they are used to a 5yr refresh don't.

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[Gravis Zero]

... today's computers are 1024 times faster than 15 years ago. ... the developers "ate" most of the gains in hardware using it for their own convenience instead of that of the end-users.

Yeah, like writing programs in a shitty script languages like say... JavaScript. -_-

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Per Moore's law, today's computers are 1024 times more complicated than 15 years ago.

FTFY. Go and read what Moore actually said - it had nothing to do with speed, and everything to do with the number of transistors.

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[mi]

like say... JavaScript. -_-

Or Ruby. Or Scala. Or...

Re:Not just Javascript being Javascript

[Gravis Zero]

I agree. Throw Python and Perl in that mess too. Yes, I've seen Perl GUI apps.

Well this is a first

[thegarbz]

Not only does the summary not mention what Slack is, but 83 comments in and none of the comments do either. Though a lot of them seem to agree it's a resource hog. Is that really all it does? I mean you could achieve the same thing by opening Rick Astley videos on youtube, hitting play, and repeating for 30 tabs.

Re: Well this is a first

[Anonymous Coward]

Assumed everyone on slashdot is at least vaguely aware or what is going on in IT.

Should someone explain what IT means also ?

Re:Well this is a first

[Anonymous Coward]

64 tabs of Rick Astley videos should be enough for anybody.

Re: Well this is a first

[Anonymous Coward]

It only takes a few words to set the subject up correctly. The rest of the post is hardly a fine example of condensed language.

One has to know one's audience, and this place is all over the shop.

I bet *you* don't know the names and use of all software currently in use, do you?

Right, stop being such a cunt.

Re:Well this is a first

[udachny]

Well, you just mentioned somebody named Rick Astley without explaining who that is either. I don't know who that is and I don't care enough to google and I don't care to hear from anybody either, but you just did exactly the thing you complained about....

Re:Well this is a first

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does the summary not mention what Slack is, but 83 comments in and none of the comments do either. Though a lot of them seem to agree it's a resource hog. Is that really all it does? I mean you could achieve the same thing by opening Rick Astley videos on youtube, hitting play, and repeating for 30 tabs.

Thanks for finally explaining what Slack is

Re:Well this is a first

[thegarbz]

Well, you just mentioned somebody named Rick Astley without explaining who that is either.

There's a difference between not providing context for understanding when understanding is the primary goal, and not providing context for the comical result of people Googling, when the comical result is the primary goal.

But don't worry man, we at Slashdot won't give you up or let you down, and we definitely won't run and hide or desert you.

Not a slack fan

[buss_error]

As noted by many, many others, Slack is a resource hog.
It's unusable in Firefox or Chrome in linux as it slows the whole machine down. Scrolling is sticky and laggy and a time sink because it takes so long.
The client is a little better, not much.
Also Slack forces you to have a General channel, which everyone is forced to use. With a few thousand people in it, it quickly because useless chatter that you can't shut out (you can mute it though).

I won't load the app on my phone. Others in my team have reported a "poor" experience and I need the phone for emergency systems down.

Overall, while Slack is pretty, I think older IRC client's with a bouncer are more suited to how I prefer to work. I'm guessing that Slack is more for people that don't want to learn how to run an IRC client and want a pretty front end to look at.

you probably aren't the use case

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience the paying customers are corporate. Generally you'll have one account, theirs. If it sucks when you and your personal crap to the system well that's on you.

But yeah they should do a better job with memory management but I don't think we should be surprised if that is low priority versus features that their paying customers want.

0.1% & 25MB of RAM

[im_thatoneguy]

I guess the windows version is better? My slack is using 0% -> 0.1% CPU at any given time and a whopping 25MB of RAM.

Nope, no problem here

[waTeim]

Of all the things that use resources which I run on my laptop including chrome, Xcode, various nodejs backed servers, NLP stuff, things in docker, Slack is not among the problems. Even after all this time, the JVM based apps are still the problematic ones. That being said, I did invest some time trying to use Atom; and it did have to be killed multiple times to avoid running out of system resources. I ascribe that to straight up bugs.

Re:Nope, no problem here

[Lord_Jeremy]

On my Mac, Xcode 8.3 is currently using 600MB of memory. That's with our main workspace loaded, with has a hierarchy of 13 separate Xcode projects providing a total of 150 targets (approx). Most of the code is C++, including several modules from boost in the workspace which makes the code intelligence plugins go nuts. Slack is currently using 1.5GB of memory, while I'm connected to 3 different teams. For some reason, that's across 5 helpers plus the main app. That's insane.

Re:Ooh. 1.5 GB. Is that supposed to be big?

[Anonymous Coward]

My motherboard maxes out at 8GB, fuck you.

brower app

[buddyglass]

I just load Slack in a browser on my (Mac) desktop. Seems fine in Firefox. Also use the iOS app on an iPhone with no issues.

Slack beta

[Corporate Gadfly]

Try the beta. It seems to be doing a lot better with CPU usage. Memory usage might still be an issue (I have 16G so I don't care).

https://slack.com/beta/mac

Have the devs never heard of...

[Anonymous Coward]

{
      free (bufferx)
}
?

Re:Have the devs never heard of...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, I forgot the semicolon. Shut up.

After years of work...

[poptix]

and numerous new chat protocols, IRC still rules them all.

poptix 4507 0.0 0.0 141996 13148 pts/4 Ssl+ Jan10 57:23 \_ irssi --config=~/.irssi/config.efnet

That's *with* 'infinite' scrollback enabled.

Re:After years of work...

[Mouldy]

Incidentally, irssi can be used to connect to a whole bunch of non-IRC networks too. Including Slack and Gitter.

Re:Ooh. 1.5 GB. Is that supposed to be big?

[Ash-Fox]

My motherboard maxes out at 8GB, fuck you.

Sounds like you're a Mac user, Mac users need to buy a new Mac to upgrade the amount of RAM available.

Reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

how much I hated using Slack.

I don't understand why people would want to use that crap. Apart from it slowing down your system, it slows down any progress on stuff you are working on. Most of the time, it is a distraction and more often then not it is either useless or not any better than e-mail.

When we dissolved our company, I was the least sad on not having to use slack anymore... Ow and I partially blame slack for your failure.

Re:WTF? This is an IRC client and a few bots at mo

[JaredOfEuropa]

Eyeballs, my friend, eyeballs. You get a couple of million people to register for whatever service you came up with, make it look like it can be mined for user data and/or used to shove ads down users' throats in some way, and you easily got yourself a valuation of 9 figures and up.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail in my Chrome (Linux) easily consumes ~1.5GB. I have to kill and reload it every now and then to free the memory, and return to its base 800ish MB of ram.

oh, I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

64 millibits doesn't sound like much to me.

What's Slack?

[Holi]

You know one of those pesky bit's of journalism. Try and tell your reader what you are talking about. No where in the summary or article does it mention what Slack does or why someone would use it, which I guess is fine because it obviously sucks.

Ryver - a Slack Alternative

[Nitrobob]

I haven't seen Ryver mentioned as an alternative to Slack in this conversation. I have tested it with a tech group that I run and I plan to take down our website and switch to Ryver for our communications. The price is right - free - and it works well as an alternative to Slack, at least for me.

Re:Ryver - a Slack Alternative

[Parker Lewis]

It's just another Electron app running the web version. In this sense (what is discussed here) is exactly the same as Slack App.

Re:Found the LUDDITE!

[therealbev]

FF52/linux 32-bit. Many crashes and memory grabs. I finally opened a new virgin profile and started adding back my beloved extensions a few at a time. No more grabs and crashes. Moved it to a 64-bit system. No appreciable speed difference or problems. I'm sorry for badmouthing FF :-(

Re:WTF? This is an IRC client and a few bots at mo

[Anonymous Coward]

Time yourself setting up the OS solution, RocketChat, integrated into Jira, Github, Heroku and AWS and then time yourself setting up the same in Slack.

Geeks like us can handle RocketChat, but normals can not. Also, I've never seen an IRC with in-channel threading, infinite searchable history across devices & sessions, code snippet support, etc.

Just like you can do everything Apple puts together for free doesn't take the value away from the for-pay solution. People are busy and Slack makes a key part of business communications with remote teams much easier.

Re:Ooh. 1.5 GB. Is that supposed to be big?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Well, some of the macs can be brought to the dealer for upgrades. The imac 27" and the mac pro do have user accesisble DIMM slots.. And apparently the imac pro doesn't have user accessible slots. Apple is out of its mind.