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

[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

[haruchai]

Shit, did I just get whooshed?

Don't worry.

The drowned don't suffer any longer.

What is dead may never die

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

Re:IRC, done poorly.

[sexconker]

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

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.

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...

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!

[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?

Slack Desktop

[Junior Samples]

What is Slack Desktop and why would I want it?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.