7 ms·

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 committe

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!
    - userbinator 9y ago
      I wrote an MSNP (Windows/MSN Messenger) client and used it for many years, all the way until Microsoft turned the protocol into a horrible XML-ised mess and then dropped support completely (as in, turned off the servers.) One standalone Win32 binary less than 32KB, usable from Win95 up to Win10; and over all the years I used it and noticed its memory usage, it was never more than 2-3MB. Yes, it had emoji support (though not very large ones, obviously.) The amounts of memory that users are reporting for Slack are all several times higher than the entire RAM of the first computer I started using my MSNP client on.
      - nasredin 9y ago
        I feel like you post is missing: I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow! Barefoot! Uphill! Both ways! or GET OFF MY LAWN!
- godot 9y ago
  I know most of this thread has been about making fun of Slack, but I wanted to write a somewhat serious response to this. I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. When one developer is working on a program, the person tends to be able to keep track of program flow, memory usage in their head and know when things are about to go out of bound, memory shoots up, etc. When you have a whole team working on a huge piece of software, each person is working on one part of it at a time. If your feature grows memory usage by 100mb, it's not a big deal. 20 people doing that, memory usage just grew by 2gb. And then in modern software dev shops, you typically put devs on different features on a weekly basis. (unlike traditional, slow, non-agile development where a person owns a certain module/component and is the expert and works on it for years) When you move to a new feature, you need to pick up on all the details of how it works previously, and you build your stuff on top of it. You don't have context of the really nitty gritty details someone who wrote the original framework thought about. You're going to do something less than ideally efficient. Unfortunately, this is just the way modern team software engineering goes. Or of course, you can still just say it's a Javascript problem and mock JS; which also has merits.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    > I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. You're not wrong, but perhaps that's an indication that software companies should use language & environments which enable them to have fewer developers, and enable those developers to keep track of things like resource usage?
    - arbie 9y ago
      But then you end up with code sprints solely to optimize resource usage, handled by programmers that didn't code the original module(s). Inefficiencies get layered over inefficiencies.
    - badosu 9y ago
      I think the point godot meant to convey is that modern software development practices disincentivize polishing and refactoring features for performance, as developers move around the application all the time; regardless of programming language. Whereas traditionally you would have an engineer responsible for part of the application as time goes by, making sure that it works better while maintaining quality.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bartread 9y ago
For the love of Pete! It's a frigging IM client: 800MB is absolutely not a reasonable amount of memory for it to be consuming, and I don't care how long your message history is. A big part of why this occurs is Electron. Same with any app that's basically a browser app: memory usage is out of control relative to what the application does. Case in point: https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ (disclaimer: I wrote this). Uses 284MB, for a version of a vector arcade game from 1980. Same issue with my version of Asteroids too: https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/ https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/. Some of this is down to the idiotic way the Web Audio API handles compressed audio, but with Asteroids I have to pre-render a lot of images because canvas 2D performance isn't that great with drawing primitives. Even excluding these issues, and allowing for several canvas layers at 1366 x 768 x 32 bits per pixel, double-buffered, and the thing still seems to consume quite a bit of RAM. Welcome to the wonderful world of JS/CSS/HTML5 apps.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  Preaching to the choir, man. I was just saying the Slack bleeding could potentially be lessened by wielding a slightly different model of chainsaw. I certainly want my gig back.
- benbristow 9y ago
  Use a machine with more RAM then. If your machine doesn't have at least 8GB of RAM then you're doing it wrong.
  - arbie 9y ago
    I can't tell if you are being serious. RAM prices have plateaued due to production shortages in the past few years, and many (high-volume) $200 laptops/Chromebooks do not come with 8GB of RAM.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    Regardless of how much RAM you have, 800MB for a chat app is ridiculous. If every common utility started using so much RAM, "[u]se a machine with more RAM" stops being viable - you can only cram so much RAM in current machines, and if you start peeling off a couple of GB because you need to run more than one chat client that's a huge loss.
codedokode 9y ago
Classic version of Skype (with all the "improvements" ) takes about 200-250Mb on Windows XP after long use. Pre-Microsoft versions could take a half of this.

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!
  - userbinator 9y ago
    I wrote an MSNP (Windows/MSN Messenger) client and used it for many years, all the way until Microsoft turned the protocol into a horrible XML-ised mess and then dropped support completely (as in, turned off the servers.) One standalone Win32 binary less than 32KB, usable from Win95 up to Win10; and over all the years I used it and noticed its memory usage, it was never more than 2-3MB. Yes, it had emoji support (though not very large ones, obviously.) The amounts of memory that users are reporting for Slack are all several times higher than the entire RAM of the first computer I started using my MSNP client on.
    - nasredin 9y ago
      I feel like you post is missing: I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow! Barefoot! Uphill! Both ways! or GET OFF MY LAWN!
godot 9y ago
I know most of this thread has been about making fun of Slack, but I wanted to write a somewhat serious response to this. I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. When one developer is working on a program, the person tends to be able to keep track of program flow, memory usage in their head and know when things are about to go out of bound, memory shoots up, etc. When you have a whole team working on a huge piece of software, each person is working on one part of it at a time. If your feature grows memory usage by 100mb, it's not a big deal. 20 people doing that, memory usage just grew by 2gb. And then in modern software dev shops, you typically put devs on different features on a weekly basis. (unlike traditional, slow, non-agile development where a person owns a certain module/component and is the expert and works on it for years) When you move to a new feature, you need to pick up on all the details of how it works previously, and you build your stuff on top of it. You don't have context of the really nitty gritty details someone who wrote the original framework thought about. You're going to do something less than ideally efficient. Unfortunately, this is just the way modern team software engineering goes. Or of course, you can still just say it's a Javascript problem and mock JS; which also has merits.
- eadmund 9y ago
  > I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. You're not wrong, but perhaps that's an indication that software companies should use language & environments which enable them to have fewer developers, and enable those developers to keep track of things like resource usage?
  - arbie 9y ago
    But then you end up with code sprints solely to optimize resource usage, handled by programmers that didn't code the original module(s). Inefficiencies get layered over inefficiencies.
  - badosu 9y ago
    I think the point godot meant to convey is that modern software development practices disincentivize polishing and refactoring features for performance, as developers move around the application all the time; regardless of programming language. Whereas traditionally you would have an engineer responsible for part of the application as time goes by, making sure that it works better while maintaining quality.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bartread 9y ago

For the love of Pete! It's a frigging IM client: 800MB is absolutely not a reasonable amount of memory for it to be consuming, and I don't care how long your message history is. A big part of why this occurs is Electron. Same with any app that's basically a browser app: memory usage is out of control relative to what the application does. Case in point: https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ (disclaimer: I wrote this). Uses 284MB, for a version of a vector arcade game from 1980. Same issue with my version of Asteroids too: https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/ https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/. Some of this is down to the idiotic way the Web Audio API handles compressed audio, but with Asteroids I have to pre-render a lot of images because canvas 2D performance isn't that great with drawing primitives. Even excluding these issues, and allowing for several canvas layers at 1366 x 768 x 32 bits per pixel, double-buffered, and the thing still seems to consume quite a bit of RAM. Welcome to the wonderful world of JS/CSS/HTML5 apps.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago
Preaching to the choir, man. I was just saying the Slack bleeding could potentially be lessened by wielding a slightly different model of chainsaw. I certainly want my gig back.
benbristow 9y ago
Use a machine with more RAM then. If your machine doesn't have at least 8GB of RAM then you're doing it wrong.
- arbie 9y ago
  I can't tell if you are being serious. RAM prices have plateaued due to production shortages in the past few years, and many (high-volume) $200 laptops/Chromebooks do not come with 8GB of RAM.
- stordoff 9y ago
  Regardless of how much RAM you have, 800MB for a chat app is ridiculous. If every common utility started using so much RAM, "[u]se a machine with more RAM" stops being viable - you can only cram so much RAM in current machines, and if you start peeling off a couple of GB because you need to run more than one chat client that's a huge loss.

codedokode 9y ago

Classic version of Skype (with all the "improvements" ) takes about 200-250Mb on Windows XP after long use. Pre-Microsoft versions could take a half of this.