15 ms·

They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required

by castis 9y ago

They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required to use Slack on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely wouldn't solely on principle.

ztoben 9y ago
That's absurd. How is it so high? Mine uses around 700MB pretty consistently.
- dijit 9y ago
  Animated custom emojis seem to be a common thread, animated images in general cause my CPU and memory to spike when using slack. Our network engineer loves this dancing parrot emoji but it basically pins a core on my machine and adds 20-30% of memory to slacks process. I've switched over to using mattermost, it can be (and is) self hosted so I'm not as worried about slack getting hacked (again) and leaking our info/taking control of our systems with chatops. The downside is; mattermost is not a strong replacement. I wrote a bot to basically do a large part of my job for me, and coding against mattermosts websocket protocol and dealing with authentication has been messy to say the least. Slack is a joy to code against and use from a UI perspective when compared. (sadly, as I don't like it for ideological reasons)
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    Mattermost is also an example of how not to license software, including a promise not to enforce provisions of the license they have chosen. If one needs a promise, one has probably chosen the wrong licensing structure. Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.) https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/... They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.
    - __david__ 9y ago
      I must be slow because I'm not seeing the issue. Can you explain it how reading the source code affects your relationship with a binary you didn't build?
  - master-litty 9y ago
    For the curious, there's some history to that parrot emoji: http://cultofthepartyparrot.com http://cultofthepartyparrot.com
    - Semaphor 9y ago
      I wouldn't call that history. I only encountered a variant of this gif once, on a discord channel having the face of one of the two streamers. This site just shows me a lot of very similar gifs.
      - master-litty 9y ago
        Towards the bottom it gives a little background, with links to more information.
    - Cogito 9y ago
      Perhaps a better source for 'history'[0] On a side note, Last Chance to See is a great book (Douglas Adams) and show (Stephen Fry), highly recommend both of them. [0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/party-parrot http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/party-parrot
- cdancette 9y ago
  Gifs, lot of gifs
- walls 9y ago
  Are you insinuating 700MB for a chat app is sane?
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    Implying more like. I see the word "insinuating" misused here often.
dieterrams 9y ago
GP said "basically electron tabs", as in the electron wrapper is functionally equivalent to a browser tab.
jsmthrowaway 9y ago
I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements. Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.
- dijit 9y ago
  That's absolutely gargantuan. How can any general purpose application justify 4G of memory, half of a factory macbook pro's memory. To put this in perspective, I was talking this week to a developer who was essentially apologising to me for a new feature that was going to require insane amounts of memory. This is for a process to handle literally millions of users. How much memory was it? 3G. Per "instance" of which we need 2... Again, for millions of people.
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    It takes a lot of memory to slowly and jerkily send plain text over the internet, and not quite keep up with typing when autocomplete-ing usernames, you know. Stop expecting so much of your computers /s
    - StudentStuff 9y ago
      Things like IRC don't support embedded images, so lets build our own protocol with blackjack and everything else! Oh wait, its a slow morass :(
      - dijit 9y ago
        Except; with IRC it's up to your client to do anything it wants. Want inline pictures? Well, Textual has had that for a long time, irccloud's webUI too.
    - aluhut 9y ago
      mIRC takes 24MB!
DanCarvajal 9y ago
Weird, my slack app on windows is currently using 54MB.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jxub 9y ago
  Maybe it's closed? ;p
- Tushon 9y ago
  Cheeky response w/o actually understanding isn't correct here. Slack's active window sits around that amount on my computer as well, but under the hood it's actually using closer to 670MB with all processes.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
zeveb 9y ago
I just use emacs-slack[0]; my entire emacs usage is currently a fraction of yours. On X, this means emacs-slack displays images, emoji &c. just like the web or pseudo-native clients do. [0] https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack
- dangom 9y ago
  I guess this is about to break because of the current announcement?
  - anglebracket 9y ago
    I don't believe so. emacs-slack uses their official OAuth2 + Websocket integration https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack#how-to-get-token-the-harder-yet-officially-sanctioned-way https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack#how-to-get-token-the-...
    - RaycatRakittra 9y ago
      Correct. emacs-slack uses WebSockets and Slack's Real-Time Messaging API.
    - eadmund 9y ago
      This is, incidentally, an argument about how a well-designed system like emacs can make writing a truly-native app easy: so easy that some random guy was able to take the API and write a client for a text editor (granted, the greatest & best text editor the world has ever known …). If it's so hard to write native macOS, Windows, gtk+ or Qt apps — maybe that's a fault of those development environments. Granted, 'display sequences of text, optionally with some images' is kinda in emacs's wheelhouse.
      - pseudalopex 9y ago
        It isn't hard to write native apps, but if you already have a web app, wrapping it in Electron is a lot cheaper.
morganvachon 9y ago
Indeed, the Windows app is horrid. One of our older workstations is a quad core i5 with 8GB, nothing special but no slouch either, and the Slack app completely chokes that machine. The employee has to run Slack on her iPhone to be able to get regular work done throughout the day. On our newer workstations it's not quite as bad but it's still noticeable. Our oldest in-service machine is a Core i7 laptop I use when I'm out in the warehouse; that one also chokes heavily with Slack. It's still 100% an improvement over what we used for chat before (Skype), but I'd be much happier running IRC or XMPP hosted on one of our servers. The boss decided on Slack instead as it's less maintenance on my part. I don't mind the extra work involved with running something we control, but the company wants me on other projects.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?
  - morganvachon 9y ago
    Mainly, reliability was an issue. There were times when the app would show a user logged in when they weren't, or logged out when they were, making it difficult to decide whether to send a message at that moment. Sometimes when trying to log in it would say that the (saved) password was incorrect, the user would go change it in their Microsoft account and it still wouldn't take it, then a few hours later it was working fine again. Slack also has much better search, and their support for attachments is dead-simple. Sending a file on Skype was always a chore that felt like it was 1999 all over again, but on Slack it's literally drag, drop, and collaborate. As I said before, Slack wasn't my first choice but it's a good platform for what it is. I don't like that our conversations and files are stored on their servers, but I doubt anyone at the company is sifting through our stuff looking for dirt or valuable info on a small business with 10 employees.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
lttlrck 9y ago
Animated images and emoji can be disabled in the Accessibility settings. Spritesheets can be disabled under Advanced. Maybe it helps, sorry I have no before/after but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now and I deal with an high number of very active channels.
- rvanmil 9y ago
  > but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now You must be overlooking all the helper processes.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Animated emojis can eat 100% CPU on my MacBook Pro if someone spams enough of them. It's insane how demanding and bloated the app is for what it does.
  - always_good 9y ago
    Yeah, I noticed that too. Except one animated emoji tagged on someone's message will do it for me on a new Macbook Pro.

by castis 9y ago

ztoben 9y ago

That's absurd. How is it so high? Mine uses around 700MB pretty consistently.

dijit 9y ago
Animated custom emojis seem to be a common thread, animated images in general cause my CPU and memory to spike when using slack. Our network engineer loves this dancing parrot emoji but it basically pins a core on my machine and adds 20-30% of memory to slacks process. I've switched over to using mattermost, it can be (and is) self hosted so I'm not as worried about slack getting hacked (again) and leaking our info/taking control of our systems with chatops. The downside is; mattermost is not a strong replacement. I wrote a bot to basically do a large part of my job for me, and coding against mattermosts websocket protocol and dealing with authentication has been messy to say the least. Slack is a joy to code against and use from a UI perspective when compared. (sadly, as I don't like it for ideological reasons)
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  Mattermost is also an example of how not to license software, including a promise not to enforce provisions of the license they have chosen. If one needs a promise, one has probably chosen the wrong licensing structure. Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.) https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/... They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.
  - __david__ 9y ago
    I must be slow because I'm not seeing the issue. Can you explain it how reading the source code affects your relationship with a binary you didn't build?
- master-litty 9y ago
  For the curious, there's some history to that parrot emoji: http://cultofthepartyparrot.com http://cultofthepartyparrot.com
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    I wouldn't call that history. I only encountered a variant of this gif once, on a discord channel having the face of one of the two streamers. This site just shows me a lot of very similar gifs.
    - master-litty 9y ago
      Towards the bottom it gives a little background, with links to more information.
  - Cogito 9y ago
    Perhaps a better source for 'history'[0] On a side note, Last Chance to See is a great book (Douglas Adams) and show (Stephen Fry), highly recommend both of them. [0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/party-parrot http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/party-parrot
cdancette 9y ago
Gifs, lot of gifs
walls 9y ago
Are you insinuating 700MB for a chat app is sane?
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Implying more like. I see the word "insinuating" misused here often.

dieterrams 9y ago

GP said "basically electron tabs", as in the electron wrapper is functionally equivalent to a browser tab.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago

I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements. Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.

dijit 9y ago
That's absolutely gargantuan. How can any general purpose application justify 4G of memory, half of a factory macbook pro's memory. To put this in perspective, I was talking this week to a developer who was essentially apologising to me for a new feature that was going to require insane amounts of memory. This is for a process to handle literally millions of users. How much memory was it? 3G. Per "instance" of which we need 2... Again, for millions of people.
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  It takes a lot of memory to slowly and jerkily send plain text over the internet, and not quite keep up with typing when autocomplete-ing usernames, you know. Stop expecting so much of your computers /s
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Things like IRC don't support embedded images, so lets build our own protocol with blackjack and everything else! Oh wait, its a slow morass :(
    - dijit 9y ago
      Except; with IRC it's up to your client to do anything it wants. Want inline pictures? Well, Textual has had that for a long time, irccloud's webUI too.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    mIRC takes 24MB!

DanCarvajal 9y ago

Weird, my slack app on windows is currently using 54MB.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jxub 9y ago
Maybe it's closed? ;p
Tushon 9y ago
Cheeky response w/o actually understanding isn't correct here. Slack's active window sits around that amount on my computer as well, but under the hood it's actually using closer to 670MB with all processes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

zeveb 9y ago

I just use emacs-slack[0]; my entire emacs usage is currently a fraction of yours. On X, this means emacs-slack displays images, emoji &c. just like the web or pseudo-native clients do. [0] https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack

dangom 9y ago
I guess this is about to break because of the current announcement?
- anglebracket 9y ago
  I don't believe so. emacs-slack uses their official OAuth2 + Websocket integration https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack#how-to-get-token-the-harder-yet-officially-sanctioned-way https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack#how-to-get-token-the-...
  - RaycatRakittra 9y ago
    Correct. emacs-slack uses WebSockets and Slack's Real-Time Messaging API.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    This is, incidentally, an argument about how a well-designed system like emacs can make writing a truly-native app easy: so easy that some random guy was able to take the API and write a client for a text editor (granted, the greatest & best text editor the world has ever known …). If it's so hard to write native macOS, Windows, gtk+ or Qt apps — maybe that's a fault of those development environments. Granted, 'display sequences of text, optionally with some images' is kinda in emacs's wheelhouse.
    - pseudalopex 9y ago
      It isn't hard to write native apps, but if you already have a web app, wrapping it in Electron is a lot cheaper.

morganvachon 9y ago

Indeed, the Windows app is horrid. One of our older workstations is a quad core i5 with 8GB, nothing special but no slouch either, and the Slack app completely chokes that machine. The employee has to run Slack on her iPhone to be able to get regular work done throughout the day. On our newer workstations it's not quite as bad but it's still noticeable. Our oldest in-service machine is a Core i7 laptop I use when I'm out in the warehouse; that one also chokes heavily with Slack. It's still 100% an improvement over what we used for chat before (Skype), but I'd be much happier running IRC or XMPP hosted on one of our servers. The boss decided on Slack instead as it's less maintenance on my part. I don't mind the extra work involved with running something we control, but the company wants me on other projects.

tannhaeuser 9y ago
Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?
- morganvachon 9y ago
  Mainly, reliability was an issue. There were times when the app would show a user logged in when they weren't, or logged out when they were, making it difficult to decide whether to send a message at that moment. Sometimes when trying to log in it would say that the (saved) password was incorrect, the user would go change it in their Microsoft account and it still wouldn't take it, then a few hours later it was working fine again. Slack also has much better search, and their support for attachments is dead-simple. Sending a file on Skype was always a chore that felt like it was 1999 all over again, but on Slack it's literally drag, drop, and collaborate. As I said before, Slack wasn't my first choice but it's a good platform for what it is. I don't like that our conversations and files are stored on their servers, but I doubt anyone at the company is sifting through our stuff looking for dirt or valuable info on a small business with 10 employees.
- dingo_bat 9y ago

lttlrck 9y ago

Animated images and emoji can be disabled in the Accessibility settings. Spritesheets can be disabled under Advanced. Maybe it helps, sorry I have no before/after but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now and I deal with an high number of very active channels.

rvanmil 9y ago
> but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now You must be overlooking all the helper processes.
rplnt 9y ago
Animated emojis can eat 100% CPU on my MacBook Pro if someone spams enough of them. It's insane how demanding and bloated the app is for what it does.
- always_good 9y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that too. Except one animated emoji tagged on someone's message will do it for me on a new Macbook Pro.