9 ms·

I will consider this benchmark vindication both for myself and the times I've had to argue as to why Electron isn't the issue, as well as the commentator from m

I will consider this benchmark vindication both for myself and the times I've had to argue as to why Electron isn't the issue, as well as the commentator from many moons ago who worked at Slack, dropped in here and explained why Electron wasn't the problem (rather, poor engineering on Slack's part was), and then was ripped to shreds over it. In fact I'm sure this comment will bring out native fanatics in force. At any rate, good for them. Seems like they reengineered themselves to a happy medium. I can definitely see myself installing it again at some point.

matchbok 7y ago
And yet, the performance is still bad. And that is only 1 of many reasons why electron is bad.
- _verandaguy 7y ago
  A hundred times this; 500-1000mb of idle memory usage by a chat client is patently silly.
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    Sure, but on my MBP it's never been a problem. I've never had slack lag regularly or notice it impacting other programs. :shrug:
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
I’m still skeptical. The memory usage chart from the article shows only a slight (10%?) improvement for single-workspace Slack clients, now at around 250MB. Yes, getting a 5+ workspace client down from ~800+MB to 300MB should be applauded - but the 250MB floor is still too high. I want to know what’s in the 250MB it’s still using.
- penagwin 7y ago
  In my experience at least ~100/150MB will be electron's minimum anyway, certainly impressive what they've done but I think they've basically hit bedrock unless they either improve electron itself or switch to something different.
- harryh 7y ago
  250MB floor is still too high Too high for what? Low end desktops and laptops today come with 8GB of ram. Using ~3% of that for a chat app doesn't seem like a big deal.
  - msbarnett 7y ago
    Too high compared to similarly featured (or even more full featured) programs built on other technologies. 3% on an Electron chat app here, 5% on an Electron text editor there, and pretty soon you’ve managed to replace what could’ve been several apps with small memory footprints plus several gigs of efficient file caching in a users’ RAM with just a few bloated programs crowding out the cache, and made their entire machine considerably less responsive.
    - harryh 7y ago
      If someone is running so much stuff that an app (or a few apps) using ~250MB of ram instead of ~100MB (or whatever) of ram is a huge problem they can easily spend $200 or so for an extra 8GB of ram. Ram is cheap. Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users.
      - thecopy 7y ago
        My RAM is soldered on.
      - SkyMarshal 7y ago
        Agree in principle, but available Ram real estate (slots) is limited, esp in mobile.
      - ben509 7y ago
        Of course, if Slack thought this were true, they wouldn't have bothered with this rewrite. Obviously no PM is going to tell customers, "just spend $200 for another 8GB of RAM to run our chat software." > Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users. The usage model is that it's on all the time. So if it's draining batteries, causing paging or otherwise slowing things down, people are going to quit Slack, thus defeating the immediacy of communication, thus defeating the point of running Slack. And Slack becomes powerful when it can be required by a workplace, which is their business model. This means the "vast majority" isn't enough at any given company.
- ex3ndr 7y ago
  iTerm2 eats 150mb+. Any cocoa app use that much of memory. App Store is 500mb just after launch.
  - seandougall 7y ago
    > Any cocoa app use that much of memory. What gives you that idea? Lots of apps have cruft, but that's nothing to do with Cocoa. A "Hello, world!" in Cocoa uses around 13 MB, and the application bundle weighs in at 79 kB. The fact that Electron uses a bare minimum of over 100 MB just to get an application running is a source of some understandable consternation.
    - Klonoar 7y ago
      His point is, actually, quite valid. By the time you stop and rebuild all the image caching/media pieces, you'll end up with a hefty amount of memory usage too - Telegram (not the Qt one, the Cocoa one) will regularly climb up to 200ish MB if I have a media-heavy chat going. People have skewed ideas of what's doable in memory constraints in 2019 for the feature sets that customers tend to expect.
      - candiodari 7y ago
        You're comparing absolute minimum of slack with a very heavily used Telegram instance. This is, given the similarity of the apps, not fair. Compare a "media-heavy" slack with that Telegram, or compare with Telegram minimum.
        Klonoar 7y ago
        No, I'm comparing the baseline: Slack's feature set. To support that, you'd need far more than a "Hello World" stack.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        The "Cocoa" Telegram is not really Cocoa at all :/
  - 7y ago
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  I checked in Firefox and a given Slack uses 200+MB at load and then optimizes down to 140MB at runtime for a given Slack, of which ~60MB is JavaScript and ~80MB is page elements. So if those numbers carry over to Electron-Chromium, then it's 100MB of "I'm a browser" and 140MB of "I'm a webpage full of dynamic and objects". They certainly will not carry over precisely equally, but it puts some scope on it to consider. (Gmail uses 250MB at runtime in the same Firefox instance, for comparison; I didn't test it in an Electron-like container.)
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    When comparing Electron and non-Electron, bear in mind that Chromium typically uses a fair bit more memory than Firefox; I’d estimate 20–40% as a rough figure, though it depends on all sorts of factors. You pick Gmail as another example. Gmail is a memory hog and fairly slow. For comparison, Fastmail (which company I work for) tends to use 10–15MB in Firefox for slightly different functionality (no chat, and I estimate the Hangouts widget to be about half of Gmail’s bloat, but on the Fastmail side you can load the calendars, contacts and settings modules in the same document comfortably without breaking 20MB), and is a good deal snappier. It comes of careful engineering with performance as a priority, and a small team. Slack is simply atrocious in these regards. Painfully slow, utterly greedy for memory. I often run it in Firefox rather than standalone to keep its memory footprint down. Whichever way I do it I regularly find it to have crept up over a gigabyte of memory, on my single workspace.
  - bhl 7y ago
    Why does slack and gmail use so much memory? It feels like it shouldn’t be an intensive process to display messages. Sidenote I don’t have much front end development besides basic web pages.
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      You can browse their memory usage in rather explicit detail about Firefox about:memory, but that assumes a rather high level of preexisting knowledge.
msbarnett 7y ago
It’s little more than a simple IRC client that consumes 250-500 megs of RAM. I wouldn’t take any victory laps over the supposed “efficiency” of Electron here.
- somethingnot 7y ago
  Yeah, and a Rolls Royce is little more than a Honda with worse miles per gallon.
  - msbarnett 7y ago
    Except in this metaphor, in terms of features, performance, and sheer quality of experience, a Rolls Royce would be something like LimeChat, and Slack is a Ford Pinto
    - somethingnot 7y ago
      Truly spoken as a programmer, whose ultimate chat experience is text in a terminal. Why would anyone want GIFs or images in their chat app? Crazy people...
      - msbarnett 7y ago
        Truly spoken like someone who isn’t aware that most IRC clients, including LimeChat, will happily display images, including gifs, but for some reason feels confident and qualified enough in their uninformed opinion to be belligerent about it on the internet.
        somethingnot 7y ago
        Funny how a google images search for limechat fails to find a single screenshot with inline images. But I'll take your word for it. I guess that settles it. People will dump Slack and Discord on mass and move to the amazing IRC clients like LimeChat which are so much more efficient. it's well known that the number one thing people look at when choosing software is how efficient they are. Nobody cares about looks or features, just about CPU cycles.
BinaryIdiot 7y ago
Depends on the problem you're talking about. Slack made their memory usage considerably worse due to poor programming so that's obviously an issue. But that also doesn't negate the other issues electron brings. Personally I would have used those years of development time to go native but it is what it is.
skavi 7y ago
you got a link to the Slack engineer's comment?

matchbok 7y ago

And yet, the performance is still bad. And that is only 1 of many reasons why electron is bad.

_verandaguy 7y ago
A hundred times this; 500-1000mb of idle memory usage by a chat client is patently silly.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  Sure, but on my MBP it's never been a problem. I've never had slack lag regularly or notice it impacting other programs. :shrug:

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago

I’m still skeptical. The memory usage chart from the article shows only a slight (10%?) improvement for single-workspace Slack clients, now at around 250MB. Yes, getting a 5+ workspace client down from ~800+MB to 300MB should be applauded - but the 250MB floor is still too high. I want to know what’s in the 250MB it’s still using.

penagwin 7y ago
In my experience at least ~100/150MB will be electron's minimum anyway, certainly impressive what they've done but I think they've basically hit bedrock unless they either improve electron itself or switch to something different.
harryh 7y ago
250MB floor is still too high Too high for what? Low end desktops and laptops today come with 8GB of ram. Using ~3% of that for a chat app doesn't seem like a big deal.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  Too high compared to similarly featured (or even more full featured) programs built on other technologies. 3% on an Electron chat app here, 5% on an Electron text editor there, and pretty soon you’ve managed to replace what could’ve been several apps with small memory footprints plus several gigs of efficient file caching in a users’ RAM with just a few bloated programs crowding out the cache, and made their entire machine considerably less responsive.
  - harryh 7y ago
    If someone is running so much stuff that an app (or a few apps) using ~250MB of ram instead of ~100MB (or whatever) of ram is a huge problem they can easily spend $200 or so for an extra 8GB of ram. Ram is cheap. Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users.
    - thecopy 7y ago
      My RAM is soldered on.
    - SkyMarshal 7y ago
      Agree in principle, but available Ram real estate (slots) is limited, esp in mobile.
    - ben509 7y ago
      Of course, if Slack thought this were true, they wouldn't have bothered with this rewrite. Obviously no PM is going to tell customers, "just spend $200 for another 8GB of RAM to run our chat software." > Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users. The usage model is that it's on all the time. So if it's draining batteries, causing paging or otherwise slowing things down, people are going to quit Slack, thus defeating the immediacy of communication, thus defeating the point of running Slack. And Slack becomes powerful when it can be required by a workplace, which is their business model. This means the "vast majority" isn't enough at any given company.
ex3ndr 7y ago
iTerm2 eats 150mb+. Any cocoa app use that much of memory. App Store is 500mb just after launch.
- seandougall 7y ago
  > Any cocoa app use that much of memory. What gives you that idea? Lots of apps have cruft, but that's nothing to do with Cocoa. A "Hello, world!" in Cocoa uses around 13 MB, and the application bundle weighs in at 79 kB. The fact that Electron uses a bare minimum of over 100 MB just to get an application running is a source of some understandable consternation.
  - Klonoar 7y ago
    His point is, actually, quite valid. By the time you stop and rebuild all the image caching/media pieces, you'll end up with a hefty amount of memory usage too - Telegram (not the Qt one, the Cocoa one) will regularly climb up to 200ish MB if I have a media-heavy chat going. People have skewed ideas of what's doable in memory constraints in 2019 for the feature sets that customers tend to expect.
    - candiodari 7y ago
      You're comparing absolute minimum of slack with a very heavily used Telegram instance. This is, given the similarity of the apps, not fair. Compare a "media-heavy" slack with that Telegram, or compare with Telegram minimum.
      - Klonoar 7y ago
        No, I'm comparing the baseline: Slack's feature set. To support that, you'd need far more than a "Hello World" stack.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      The "Cocoa" Telegram is not really Cocoa at all :/
- 7y ago
floatingatoll 7y ago
I checked in Firefox and a given Slack uses 200+MB at load and then optimizes down to 140MB at runtime for a given Slack, of which ~60MB is JavaScript and ~80MB is page elements. So if those numbers carry over to Electron-Chromium, then it's 100MB of "I'm a browser" and 140MB of "I'm a webpage full of dynamic and objects". They certainly will not carry over precisely equally, but it puts some scope on it to consider. (Gmail uses 250MB at runtime in the same Firefox instance, for comparison; I didn't test it in an Electron-like container.)
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  When comparing Electron and non-Electron, bear in mind that Chromium typically uses a fair bit more memory than Firefox; I’d estimate 20–40% as a rough figure, though it depends on all sorts of factors. You pick Gmail as another example. Gmail is a memory hog and fairly slow. For comparison, Fastmail (which company I work for) tends to use 10–15MB in Firefox for slightly different functionality (no chat, and I estimate the Hangouts widget to be about half of Gmail’s bloat, but on the Fastmail side you can load the calendars, contacts and settings modules in the same document comfortably without breaking 20MB), and is a good deal snappier. It comes of careful engineering with performance as a priority, and a small team. Slack is simply atrocious in these regards. Painfully slow, utterly greedy for memory. I often run it in Firefox rather than standalone to keep its memory footprint down. Whichever way I do it I regularly find it to have crept up over a gigabyte of memory, on my single workspace.
- bhl 7y ago
  Why does slack and gmail use so much memory? It feels like it shouldn’t be an intensive process to display messages. Sidenote I don’t have much front end development besides basic web pages.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    You can browse their memory usage in rather explicit detail about Firefox about:memory, but that assumes a rather high level of preexisting knowledge.

msbarnett 7y ago

It’s little more than a simple IRC client that consumes 250-500 megs of RAM. I wouldn’t take any victory laps over the supposed “efficiency” of Electron here.

somethingnot 7y ago
Yeah, and a Rolls Royce is little more than a Honda with worse miles per gallon.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  Except in this metaphor, in terms of features, performance, and sheer quality of experience, a Rolls Royce would be something like LimeChat, and Slack is a Ford Pinto
  - somethingnot 7y ago
    Truly spoken as a programmer, whose ultimate chat experience is text in a terminal. Why would anyone want GIFs or images in their chat app? Crazy people...
    - msbarnett 7y ago
      Truly spoken like someone who isn’t aware that most IRC clients, including LimeChat, will happily display images, including gifs, but for some reason feels confident and qualified enough in their uninformed opinion to be belligerent about it on the internet.
      - somethingnot 7y ago
        Funny how a google images search for limechat fails to find a single screenshot with inline images. But I'll take your word for it. I guess that settles it. People will dump Slack and Discord on mass and move to the amazing IRC clients like LimeChat which are so much more efficient. it's well known that the number one thing people look at when choosing software is how efficient they are. Nobody cares about looks or features, just about CPU cycles.

BinaryIdiot 7y ago

Depends on the problem you're talking about. Slack made their memory usage considerably worse due to poor programming so that's obviously an issue. But that also doesn't negate the other issues electron brings. Personally I would have used those years of development time to go native but it is what it is.

skavi 7y ago

you got a link to the Slack engineer's comment?