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

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]

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

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.

Slack Desktop

[Junior Samples]

What is Slack Desktop and why would I want it?

Re:React & Electron

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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.