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I use this personally. Its great. Hides all the cruft that people post in slack as text. I've been working on trying to extend it on the side. A chat client s

I use this personally. Its great. Hides all the cruft that people post in slack as text. I've been working on trying to extend it on the side. A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM

bitL 9y ago
> 1GB of RAM You meant 1MB, right? ;-)
- olympus 9y ago
  It shouldn't take more than 1MB, but a "power user" with the stock Slack desktop client will probably see RAM usage of 1.5 GB[1]. So* GP was referencing the fact that currently the Slack desktop client is using >1GB and that is way too much. * I recognize your sarcasm, but figured I'd reply anyway since the internet is a weird place and lots of people might not catch the joke. [1] 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...
dawnerd 9y ago
I was gonna say there's no way slack uses that much, then I actually looked. 750+mb.... What in the world are they doing?
- panic 9y ago
  > What in the world are they doing? Literally no one knows! It's layers upon layers of code. Most of the layers can't even be understood by a single person, let alone the whole program.
- rockostrich 9y ago
  It's based on Electron[1] which has a reputation for being a bit of a resource hog. The upside is that it makes it really easy to create a cross-platform app. [1] https://electronjs.org/ https://electronjs.org/
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    I use quite a few electron apps and none of them seem to get that bad except maybe atom but I have a TON of open windows.
    - flamtap 9y ago
      Slack gets pretty resource-intensive when the user is part of multiple workspaces. I know one of my co-workers is part of three or four, whereas I'm only part of the main company workspace. Co-worker's Slack memory usage is around triple that of my own.
antjanus 9y ago
how is it taking up that much data? I'm at 550mbs with 6 very active teams and while on voice chat. Dropped out of voice chat I'm at 340mb. Each team has 10-20 channels. I also use Discord which uses Electron and with it, I'm on 8 separate active servers with anywhere from 10-30 channels. This sits at 115mb without an issue. Can you tell me where these electron metrics come from where people have slack take up 1gb or even 2gb of memory?
- lozenge 9y ago
  Every Slack workspace creates an Electron instance. If you're on three workspaces, that's like running three totally separate browsers.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    What the hell?
  - mattbierner 9y ago
    More information about how Slack uses electron's Webview and BrowserView: https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-desktop-app-to-browserview-2759690d9c7b https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-des...
  - antjanus 9y ago
    That's not entirely right. Each workspace is an equivalent of a tab, not a browser.
- guessmyname 9y ago
  > I'm at 550mbs with 6 very active teams and while on voice chat. Dropped out of voice chat I'm at 340mb That's still a lot of RAM for a chat with giant emojis. You have to consider that people reporting these issues with memory consumption are running the app in different operating system than yours. Maybe your system is optimized. I just checked my co-workers computer and his main Slack process is at +97MB but there are 3 instances of "Slack Helper" at +433MB, +297MB and +255MB respectively. That's over 1GB in total. So either you are just looking at the main Slack process (which at +340MB makes sense) or your Slack is leaking memory somewhere that your RAM monitor is not able to map.
vbezhenar 9y ago
Current software stacks are incredibly bloated. I recently wrote a simple Java web server. I took care no to use unnecessary memory, I didn't use a single library for it, yet it can't do even basic functions without OOM unless I'm giving it 16MB RAM for heap (and it eats even more for other things). So almost 20 MB RAM for hello world. And that's for relatively efficient VM. I guess, similar web server written with C would use around 20 KB RAM (and most of it for I/O buffers).
- tachyoff 9y ago
  That's such an unfair comparison, though (and really, with 8+ GB of RAM being the norm, 20 MB is still pretty svelte). Java has an entire virtual machine and runtime, whereas a C program is just a binary that gets loaded straight into memory.
  - TickleSteve 9y ago
    functionally and computationally, the tiny C program and the java monster would be doing the same thing.... So yes, they're comparable. Choosing inefficient ways to do things (in the case of Java) is not a way to escape comparison.
    - tachyoff 9y ago
      You can't say "wow, look how much smaller the C program is" and then ignore why it's so much smaller in the first place (no runtime, no garbage collection, etc.) If that's the case, then we should hand-roll assembly all the time because it's "smaller". You also can't just call Java inefficient because it produces larger programs or is "slower". It's all about choosing the right tool for the job.
      - foobiekr 9y ago
        Perhaps Java should have been designed to scale down and not require all that stuff when perfectly reasonable applications don't need them all the time.
jerf 9y ago
What's the advantages of using the client vs. using it as a tab in your browser? Tab in the browser seems to be working for me OK, once I figured out I could "pin" the tab in Firefox, which prevented me from accidentally closing it.
- astronautjones 9y ago
  I work with three to four Adobe programs open for my workflow, even the browser version has a noticeable effect on performance. I actually run it on a $60 Amazon tablet next to my monitor (only because our organization insists on slack)
qudat 9y ago
> A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM Why do you care so much about RAM usage? All this concern over RAM is completely missing the picture here. Every conversation about slack or electron people complain about RAM usage. The market could not give two shits about RAM usage so why does everyone on HN complain about it?
- sRabbit 9y ago
  Because when you combine that with the silly MS overhead from useless processes because the team that controls your Win 10 environment insists on running Group Policy without a care.. then you notice that your machine is suddenly bogged down, when it's been running fine for the years you had total control of it! !!
- astronautjones 9y ago
  Because a large percentage of HN commenters are programmers? Wasteful is wasteful
- c22 9y ago
  Probably because their $3000 desktops are grinding to a crawl under these unwieldy stacks of cruft. The market might not care but that's only because most users are too naive to realize that spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a year upgrading their phones and laptops is neither necessary nor desirable. Eventually consumers in this space will gain more awareness and these wasteful software development practices will have to end.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  1GB of RAM is anywhere from 25-50% of the RAM available on the average new (let alone used) consumer-grade laptop. For a chat app. And that's not even factoring in the OS overhead. That's fucking bonkers. Objectively and scientifically fucking bonkers.
- lewisinc 9y ago
  My computer is like a garden - treat it with respect or we can’t be friends.

I use this personally. Its great. Hides all the cruft that people post in slack as text. I've been working on trying to extend it on the side. A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM

bitL 9y ago

> 1GB of RAM You meant 1MB, right? ;-)

olympus 9y ago
It shouldn't take more than 1MB, but a "power user" with the stock Slack desktop client will probably see RAM usage of 1.5 GB[1]. So* GP was referencing the fact that currently the Slack desktop client is using >1GB and that is way too much. * I recognize your sarcasm, but figured I'd reply anyway since the internet is a weird place and lots of people might not catch the joke. [1] 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...

dawnerd 9y ago

I was gonna say there's no way slack uses that much, then I actually looked. 750+mb.... What in the world are they doing?

panic 9y ago
> What in the world are they doing? Literally no one knows! It's layers upon layers of code. Most of the layers can't even be understood by a single person, let alone the whole program.
rockostrich 9y ago
It's based on Electron[1] which has a reputation for being a bit of a resource hog. The upside is that it makes it really easy to create a cross-platform app. [1] https://electronjs.org/ https://electronjs.org/
- dawnerd 9y ago
  I use quite a few electron apps and none of them seem to get that bad except maybe atom but I have a TON of open windows.
  - flamtap 9y ago
    Slack gets pretty resource-intensive when the user is part of multiple workspaces. I know one of my co-workers is part of three or four, whereas I'm only part of the main company workspace. Co-worker's Slack memory usage is around triple that of my own.

antjanus 9y ago

how is it taking up that much data? I'm at 550mbs with 6 very active teams and while on voice chat. Dropped out of voice chat I'm at 340mb. Each team has 10-20 channels. I also use Discord which uses Electron and with it, I'm on 8 separate active servers with anywhere from 10-30 channels. This sits at 115mb without an issue. Can you tell me where these electron metrics come from where people have slack take up 1gb or even 2gb of memory?

lozenge 9y ago
Every Slack workspace creates an Electron instance. If you're on three workspaces, that's like running three totally separate browsers.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  What the hell?
- mattbierner 9y ago
  More information about how Slack uses electron's Webview and BrowserView: https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-desktop-app-to-browserview-2759690d9c7b https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-des...
- antjanus 9y ago
  That's not entirely right. Each workspace is an equivalent of a tab, not a browser.
guessmyname 9y ago
> I'm at 550mbs with 6 very active teams and while on voice chat. Dropped out of voice chat I'm at 340mb That's still a lot of RAM for a chat with giant emojis. You have to consider that people reporting these issues with memory consumption are running the app in different operating system than yours. Maybe your system is optimized. I just checked my co-workers computer and his main Slack process is at +97MB but there are 3 instances of "Slack Helper" at +433MB, +297MB and +255MB respectively. That's over 1GB in total. So either you are just looking at the main Slack process (which at +340MB makes sense) or your Slack is leaking memory somewhere that your RAM monitor is not able to map.

vbezhenar 9y ago

Current software stacks are incredibly bloated. I recently wrote a simple Java web server. I took care no to use unnecessary memory, I didn't use a single library for it, yet it can't do even basic functions without OOM unless I'm giving it 16MB RAM for heap (and it eats even more for other things). So almost 20 MB RAM for hello world. And that's for relatively efficient VM. I guess, similar web server written with C would use around 20 KB RAM (and most of it for I/O buffers).

tachyoff 9y ago
That's such an unfair comparison, though (and really, with 8+ GB of RAM being the norm, 20 MB is still pretty svelte). Java has an entire virtual machine and runtime, whereas a C program is just a binary that gets loaded straight into memory.
- TickleSteve 9y ago
  functionally and computationally, the tiny C program and the java monster would be doing the same thing.... So yes, they're comparable. Choosing inefficient ways to do things (in the case of Java) is not a way to escape comparison.
  - tachyoff 9y ago
    You can't say "wow, look how much smaller the C program is" and then ignore why it's so much smaller in the first place (no runtime, no garbage collection, etc.) If that's the case, then we should hand-roll assembly all the time because it's "smaller". You also can't just call Java inefficient because it produces larger programs or is "slower". It's all about choosing the right tool for the job.
    - foobiekr 9y ago
      Perhaps Java should have been designed to scale down and not require all that stuff when perfectly reasonable applications don't need them all the time.

jerf 9y ago

What's the advantages of using the client vs. using it as a tab in your browser? Tab in the browser seems to be working for me OK, once I figured out I could "pin" the tab in Firefox, which prevented me from accidentally closing it.

astronautjones 9y ago
I work with three to four Adobe programs open for my workflow, even the browser version has a noticeable effect on performance. I actually run it on a $60 Amazon tablet next to my monitor (only because our organization insists on slack)

qudat 9y ago

> A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM Why do you care so much about RAM usage? All this concern over RAM is completely missing the picture here. Every conversation about slack or electron people complain about RAM usage. The market could not give two shits about RAM usage so why does everyone on HN complain about it?

sRabbit 9y ago
Because when you combine that with the silly MS overhead from useless processes because the team that controls your Win 10 environment insists on running Group Policy without a care.. then you notice that your machine is suddenly bogged down, when it's been running fine for the years you had total control of it! !!
astronautjones 9y ago
Because a large percentage of HN commenters are programmers? Wasteful is wasteful
c22 9y ago
Probably because their $3000 desktops are grinding to a crawl under these unwieldy stacks of cruft. The market might not care but that's only because most users are too naive to realize that spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a year upgrading their phones and laptops is neither necessary nor desirable. Eventually consumers in this space will gain more awareness and these wasteful software development practices will have to end.
yellowapple 9y ago
1GB of RAM is anywhere from 25-50% of the RAM available on the average new (let alone used) consumer-grade laptop. For a chat app. And that's not even factoring in the OS overhead. That's fucking bonkers. Objectively and scientifically fucking bonkers.
lewisinc 9y ago
My computer is like a garden - treat it with respect or we can’t be friends.