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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.
Norton and McAfee can use more cpu they should buy this!
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.
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.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
What is Slack Desktop and why would I want it?
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.
But mIRC let you slap people around a bit with a large trout.