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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.
Don't use Slack. There are countless chat applications available, including free and open source ones. Most of them are not resource intensive.
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.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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)
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?
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?
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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."