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

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!

[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?

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.