5 ms·

So, I cannot reproduce his findings. My system (same setup, Slack native app on macOS) is consuming 1.6% CPU, about 0.6 GB memory, and has avg. energy impact of

So, I cannot reproduce his findings. My system (same setup, Slack native app on macOS) is consuming 1.6% CPU, about 0.6 GB memory, and has avg. energy impact of 3.22 with current being 0.0. The memory is high, but a lot less than Chrome and nothing near what the author is seeing. Only differences I can see: - I'm signed into two accounts while the author is signed into 11. - The author is CEO of a competing messaging platform. More experiments might be needed here.

slantyyz 9y ago
I'm on Windows, and I see a similar thing. 0% CPU, ~130MB of RAM in Task Manager. Most of my 16GB of RAM is being consumed by my mess of open Chrome windows.
- Roritharr 9y ago
  Just looked at it, Windows 10, the main process says 83MB of RAM and 0% CPU... but scrolling down in the background tasks there is EIGHT background tasks, each consuming atleast 0,5% CPU and a staggering 943,2 MB of RAM... And its just running as a tray icon. It seems they are trying to hide what they actually use.
  - slantyyz 9y ago
    For my situation, I had four or five background tasks, each consuming < 50MB and 0 CPU.
eridius 9y ago
I'm signed into 6 accounts right now, but I only visit 3 regularly (and Slack supposedly no longer keeps all teams in memory if you're not looking at them), and my average energy impact is 10.07. That puts it solidly in the #2 spot (with #1 being Xcode, which makes sense because I'm compiling all the time). I currently have 8 Slack Helper processes, one of which is sticking around 6-7% CPU, but the others are between 0–1%. Slack itself is around 4% (this is without me interacting with it, and with no animated GIFs visible on the screen right now). FWIW the impact of animated GIFs (including animated custom emoji) is pretty high. Switching to a channel where there's 5 tiny animated custom emoji pushes CPU usage up to 18–20% for Slack Helper, pushes Slack itself up to about 9–10%, and makes my Energy Impact jump to 40–50 (which is insane).
abjorn 9y ago
The authors company isn't a Slack competitor, it's a real-time data platform. Otherwise I imagine they wouldn't be using Slack for their internal messaging.
- tobyjsullivan 9y ago
  From the page: > Matthew O' Riordan is CEO and Co-founder of Ably. Ably is a platform that makes it easy for developers to add realtime messaging... to their applications. Slack is realtime messaging. Ably is realtime messaging. They are competitors - the only question is how direct.
  - avarun 9y ago
    ...no? Google and Algolia aren't competitors.
  - Veratyr 9y ago
    Slack is chat, its messages are sent and read by humans. Ably is a developer API, its messages are sent and read by machines. Slack has a shiny user interface and a bunch of nice enterprise features. It's something you'd have everyone in your company sitting on their machine all day. Ably is something nobody will ever see. It's an API that underlies other people's applications. Hell, Slack could run on top of Ably. They're absolutely not competing. You're either misreading or deliberately misleading.
  - LASR 9y ago
    So what? Doesn't mean what he says is false. This sort of ad hominem attack on the author and not the argument is a logical fallacy.
chickenfries 9y ago
> The author is CEO of a competing messaging platform. I went to their website, it doesn't seem like that kind of messaging. > Ably is a realtime data delivery platform providing developers everything they need to create, deliver and manage complex projects. Ably solves the hardest parts so they don’t have to. Our 100% data delivery guarantee offers unique peace of mind to stream data between apps, websites and servers anywhere on earth in milliseconds.
developer2 9y ago
Slack currently uses a separate webview for each team you're signed in to[1]. They're apparently working to optimize the app for those running multiple teams. People like to hate on Electron, but in this case Slack's implementation of multiple teams deserves more blame than the underlying stack. [1] https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint-4480fec7e8eb https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint-4... Quotes: >> This memory footprint increases as the user signs into more teams, as each team runs in its own webview. >> Each of these teams is running the full JavaScript web application and maintaining and updating the DOM tree as the state of the team changes. >> Work is underway to fix the underlying factors affecting client memory consumption >> Exploring running all teams in a shared context to eliminate the overhead of one webview per team.
- shawnz 9y ago
  > a separate webview for each team you're signed in to So then shouldn't it be the same penalty as having 11 pages of Slack open in Chrome? That seems like something not too extreme to me.
  - developer2 9y ago
    I'm not certain of their use of the word "webview", nor exactly how multiple rendering windows work in Electron. In theory it should work the same as multiple tabs in a single Chromium instance. In any case, the Slack app is very heavy. You should be able to manage all your teams in one tab with a single instance of the app rather than a separate tab with the entire single-page app having to be loaded over and over again.
jsight 9y ago
Maybe the teams that he is on tend to send images (in particular GIFs)?
dijit 9y ago
Dunno man: http://i.imgur.com/u2KZEhZ.png http://i.imgur.com/u2KZEhZ.png Windows 10 memory compression saves them a lot, but this is absurd, chrome/outlook use roughly 30% of this.
LASR 9y ago
There is no native Slack app. They're all Electron apps. But I think you already knew that. 2 vs 11 is the precise difference that is important. The author shows that things are more reasonable with 2 accounts. Without seeming to endorse one platform over another, I've personally seen Slack to be a huge memory, cpu and battery hog. Most of the time, I don't have it open and it hugely hinders my response time to my team. But I can't lug around my 64 GB RAM hackintosh to a coffee shop. 6 Teams on my computer: https://pasteboard.co/GCWfKca.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWfKca.png Edit: Decided to write a little bit more on this. > How? The problem is with Electron shell apps. Electron, while it has made it extremely easy to build a webapp and then ship "native" versions of that webapp across Windows, Linux and macOS, the end product is horribly bloated. Here are 3 Electron shell apps I am running. They're all bloated. I can't run too many of these at the same time. This laptop has 16 GB of RAM. The other Macbook I have has only 8 GB. https://pasteboard.co/GCWiqSB.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWiqSB.png - Spotify (music) - Slack (messaging) - Dialpad (voip + messaging) So why is it like that? Electron shell is basically Chromium browser with a much more comprehensive native API that a web browser will allow. The 'Native' UI you're seeing is HTML/CSS and JS. > Why? Chromium introduced a very long time ago a process model such that the various subsystems are run in separate processes communicating over IPC. This is very different to a traditional app where you have one process splitting up work over to worker threads. Chromium used this model to make a solid web browser. Each tab is its own independent process. Each extension is its own process. The rendering work is done in its own process. Look at the Chrome task manager for example: https://pasteboard.co/GCWmnS9.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWmnS9.png The rationale behind this was that if a webpage caused the browser to crash, it would only crash that one tab and not take down the entire browser. Since processes are isolated into their own virtual memory space, there is much more secure sandbox isolation across processes - so even in the case of a security vulnerability, the process model is fail-safe. The problem now is that all these processes have a higher overhead. Modern OSes are smart enough to copy-on-write when a process forks (duplicates like a biological cell) - so you're not exactly linearly increasing memory overhead. Now that these processes are running, they need to communicate with each other. By default, processes are independant and don't share memory across them. So any communication has to be done with IPC(mechanisms for processes to communicate with eachother). This typically happens through Named Pipes, Unix sockets, or even TCP and HTTP. All of this carries more overhead. Running a whole http server to talk just intra-app is absurd and I don't believe any common apps do this. But these types of mechanisms are how these processes talk. > Solution? Now back to the concept of the process-model. The isolated process model worked well for browsers. But in the confines of a single app, they don't work well. I would much rather have a single process Electron shell that is able to spawn background threads to do additional work. Sadly, we're way too far down the other road. I don't know of any effort in Chromium or Electron to retro fit the process model. But if we had one, it would be awesome. You could also not use Electron shell to build apps. Modern platform frameworks are pretty good. Windows has a XAML + .Net frameworks that is somewhat similar to HTML/CSS/JS. macOS has the fully native Swift and UIKit. Linux...well Linux is good in it's own way too. But this is really not an option for most start-ups. So don't do that if you're a small company. I would much rather see and use your slow bloated product than to not being able to use it on all platforms.
matt_oriordan 9y ago
Hi Toby Quick responses: > I'm signed into two accounts while the author is signed into 11. Yup. Also, see a subsequent update at https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memory-gone-the-answer-slack-9e5c39207cab https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor.... One of the Slack developers got in touch and confirmed this issue is resolved in beta 2.7.0. I tried it and it is indeed. > The author is CEO of a competing messaging platform Ably is not a competitive platform in any way whatsoever. We are a realtime data distribution platform, we have no consumer apps or products you can use, only a low level platform-as-a-service for broadcasting realtime data.
kerbalspacepro 9y ago
Ditto. Average energy impact is 3.24.

slantyyz 9y ago

I'm on Windows, and I see a similar thing. 0% CPU, ~130MB of RAM in Task Manager. Most of my 16GB of RAM is being consumed by my mess of open Chrome windows.

Roritharr 9y ago
Just looked at it, Windows 10, the main process says 83MB of RAM and 0% CPU... but scrolling down in the background tasks there is EIGHT background tasks, each consuming atleast 0,5% CPU and a staggering 943,2 MB of RAM... And its just running as a tray icon. It seems they are trying to hide what they actually use.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  For my situation, I had four or five background tasks, each consuming < 50MB and 0 CPU.

eridius 9y ago

I'm signed into 6 accounts right now, but I only visit 3 regularly (and Slack supposedly no longer keeps all teams in memory if you're not looking at them), and my average energy impact is 10.07. That puts it solidly in the #2 spot (with #1 being Xcode, which makes sense because I'm compiling all the time). I currently have 8 Slack Helper processes, one of which is sticking around 6-7% CPU, but the others are between 0–1%. Slack itself is around 4% (this is without me interacting with it, and with no animated GIFs visible on the screen right now). FWIW the impact of animated GIFs (including animated custom emoji) is pretty high. Switching to a channel where there's 5 tiny animated custom emoji pushes CPU usage up to 18–20% for Slack Helper, pushes Slack itself up to about 9–10%, and makes my Energy Impact jump to 40–50 (which is insane).

abjorn 9y ago

The authors company isn't a Slack competitor, it's a real-time data platform. Otherwise I imagine they wouldn't be using Slack for their internal messaging.

tobyjsullivan 9y ago
From the page: > Matthew O' Riordan is CEO and Co-founder of Ably. Ably is a platform that makes it easy for developers to add realtime messaging... to their applications. Slack is realtime messaging. Ably is realtime messaging. They are competitors - the only question is how direct.
- avarun 9y ago
  ...no? Google and Algolia aren't competitors.
- Veratyr 9y ago
  Slack is chat, its messages are sent and read by humans. Ably is a developer API, its messages are sent and read by machines. Slack has a shiny user interface and a bunch of nice enterprise features. It's something you'd have everyone in your company sitting on their machine all day. Ably is something nobody will ever see. It's an API that underlies other people's applications. Hell, Slack could run on top of Ably. They're absolutely not competing. You're either misreading or deliberately misleading.
- LASR 9y ago
  So what? Doesn't mean what he says is false. This sort of ad hominem attack on the author and not the argument is a logical fallacy.

chickenfries 9y ago

> The author is CEO of a competing messaging platform. I went to their website, it doesn't seem like that kind of messaging. > Ably is a realtime data delivery platform providing developers everything they need to create, deliver and manage complex projects. Ably solves the hardest parts so they don’t have to. Our 100% data delivery guarantee offers unique peace of mind to stream data between apps, websites and servers anywhere on earth in milliseconds.

developer2 9y ago

Slack currently uses a separate webview for each team you're signed in to[1]. They're apparently working to optimize the app for those running multiple teams. People like to hate on Electron, but in this case Slack's implementation of multiple teams deserves more blame than the underlying stack. [1] https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint-4480fec7e8eb https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint-4... Quotes: >> This memory footprint increases as the user signs into more teams, as each team runs in its own webview. >> Each of these teams is running the full JavaScript web application and maintaining and updating the DOM tree as the state of the team changes. >> Work is underway to fix the underlying factors affecting client memory consumption >> Exploring running all teams in a shared context to eliminate the overhead of one webview per team.

shawnz 9y ago
> a separate webview for each team you're signed in to So then shouldn't it be the same penalty as having 11 pages of Slack open in Chrome? That seems like something not too extreme to me.
- developer2 9y ago
  I'm not certain of their use of the word "webview", nor exactly how multiple rendering windows work in Electron. In theory it should work the same as multiple tabs in a single Chromium instance. In any case, the Slack app is very heavy. You should be able to manage all your teams in one tab with a single instance of the app rather than a separate tab with the entire single-page app having to be loaded over and over again.

jsight 9y ago

Maybe the teams that he is on tend to send images (in particular GIFs)?

dijit 9y ago

Dunno man: http://i.imgur.com/u2KZEhZ.png http://i.imgur.com/u2KZEhZ.png Windows 10 memory compression saves them a lot, but this is absurd, chrome/outlook use roughly 30% of this.

LASR 9y ago

There is no native Slack app. They're all Electron apps. But I think you already knew that. 2 vs 11 is the precise difference that is important. The author shows that things are more reasonable with 2 accounts. Without seeming to endorse one platform over another, I've personally seen Slack to be a huge memory, cpu and battery hog. Most of the time, I don't have it open and it hugely hinders my response time to my team. But I can't lug around my 64 GB RAM hackintosh to a coffee shop. 6 Teams on my computer: https://pasteboard.co/GCWfKca.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWfKca.png Edit: Decided to write a little bit more on this. > How? The problem is with Electron shell apps. Electron, while it has made it extremely easy to build a webapp and then ship "native" versions of that webapp across Windows, Linux and macOS, the end product is horribly bloated. Here are 3 Electron shell apps I am running. They're all bloated. I can't run too many of these at the same time. This laptop has 16 GB of RAM. The other Macbook I have has only 8 GB. https://pasteboard.co/GCWiqSB.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWiqSB.png - Spotify (music) - Slack (messaging) - Dialpad (voip + messaging) So why is it like that? Electron shell is basically Chromium browser with a much more comprehensive native API that a web browser will allow. The 'Native' UI you're seeing is HTML/CSS and JS. > Why? Chromium introduced a very long time ago a process model such that the various subsystems are run in separate processes communicating over IPC. This is very different to a traditional app where you have one process splitting up work over to worker threads. Chromium used this model to make a solid web browser. Each tab is its own independent process. Each extension is its own process. The rendering work is done in its own process. Look at the Chrome task manager for example: https://pasteboard.co/GCWmnS9.png https://pasteboard.co/GCWmnS9.png The rationale behind this was that if a webpage caused the browser to crash, it would only crash that one tab and not take down the entire browser. Since processes are isolated into their own virtual memory space, there is much more secure sandbox isolation across processes - so even in the case of a security vulnerability, the process model is fail-safe. The problem now is that all these processes have a higher overhead. Modern OSes are smart enough to copy-on-write when a process forks (duplicates like a biological cell) - so you're not exactly linearly increasing memory overhead. Now that these processes are running, they need to communicate with each other. By default, processes are independant and don't share memory across them. So any communication has to be done with IPC(mechanisms for processes to communicate with eachother). This typically happens through Named Pipes, Unix sockets, or even TCP and HTTP. All of this carries more overhead. Running a whole http server to talk just intra-app is absurd and I don't believe any common apps do this. But these types of mechanisms are how these processes talk. > Solution? Now back to the concept of the process-model. The isolated process model worked well for browsers. But in the confines of a single app, they don't work well. I would much rather have a single process Electron shell that is able to spawn background threads to do additional work. Sadly, we're way too far down the other road. I don't know of any effort in Chromium or Electron to retro fit the process model. But if we had one, it would be awesome. You could also not use Electron shell to build apps. Modern platform frameworks are pretty good. Windows has a XAML + .Net frameworks that is somewhat similar to HTML/CSS/JS. macOS has the fully native Swift and UIKit. Linux...well Linux is good in it's own way too. But this is really not an option for most start-ups. So don't do that if you're a small company. I would much rather see and use your slow bloated product than to not being able to use it on all platforms.

matt_oriordan 9y ago

Hi Toby Quick responses: > I'm signed into two accounts while the author is signed into 11. Yup. Also, see a subsequent update at https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memory-gone-the-answer-slack-9e5c39207cab https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor.... One of the Slack developers got in touch and confirmed this issue is resolved in beta 2.7.0. I tried it and it is indeed. > The author is CEO of a competing messaging platform Ably is not a competitive platform in any way whatsoever. We are a realtime data distribution platform, we have no consumer apps or products you can use, only a low level platform-as-a-service for broadcasting realtime data.

kerbalspacepro 9y ago

Ditto. Average energy impact is 3.24.