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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.
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.
Fide Wikipedia:
The beginning does promise lots of memory usage already...
Connect to Slack over IRC and XMPP. I tried this for I while but it was awkward in my experience.
Email is not optimal at back-and-forth *group* conversations, where Slack excels.
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.
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.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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".
"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)