2 ms·

it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at

it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at 85% usage and begin wasting battery, heating up, spinning fans, etc. if somebody told me twenty years ago how powerful this CPU was, relative to what I was using at the time for a desktop PC, and that a chat application could pretty much max out the CPU and use multi gigs of RAM, I would have laughed...

paxys 4y ago
What does that have to do with Slack? If your computer has trouble playing high frame rate video it'll be the same on every application.
- lloeki 4y ago
  It's not just high framerate stuff, it's pervasive. Folks used to post walls of dancing bananas in phpBB and my Pentium III could handle that without breaking a sweat. The exact same wall of dancing bananas makes any modern CPU jump to ridiculous two-digit usage relative to the task at hand. I was also chatting over IRC from a Palm Pilot which had something on the order of 1MB of RAM, connected over RS232 to a GPRS phone, and the current experience of chat performance is basically on par with that, which boggles the mind given that I now have ten thousand times the RAM, an internet connection that can't be saturated in practice, and latency largely bound by the speed of light. Slack's requirements are completely ludicrous in regard of what it's set to achieve. > it'll be the same on every application. Except, it's not. Counterexamples of chat apps with reasonable to stellar performance abound over the last two decades.
- walrus01 4y ago
  Except that I can play a 4k 60fps 100Mbps bitrate HEVC video in vlc with 1/6th of the cpu usage slack needs to display a damned gif
  - beiller 4y ago
    I think you'll notice the CPU cannot play 4K 60fps in GIF format. Maybe the problem is literally the format itself, which is terrible. It's too bad something like MPEG or some of the animated PNG / JPEG / WEBM formats never took off for meme-y animated images.
  - derekdahmer 4y ago
    I wonder if it would help if Slack converted gifs to MP4s in the background before displaying them, or if the perf problem is in the compositing.
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
> it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at 85% usage and begin wasting battery, heating up, spinning fans, etc. There’s a setting to disable animated gifs. Which also disables party parrots and other animated crap emojis. There it is: https://slack.com/help/articles/228023907-Manage-animated-images-and-emoji https://slack.com/help/articles/228023907-Manage-animated-im....
- philsnow 4y ago
  I also got tired of this especially when I wasn't even looking at Slack but it was not hidden, so it kept animating gifs and emoji etc that I can't see. Hammerspoon let me just disable them whenever I was on battery power: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/4086e07b28d8d3cd17f5bf81ff85357f https://gist.github.com/philsnow/4086e07b28d8d3cd17f5bf81ff8...

paxys 4y ago

What does that have to do with Slack? If your computer has trouble playing high frame rate video it'll be the same on every application.

lloeki 4y ago
It's not just high framerate stuff, it's pervasive. Folks used to post walls of dancing bananas in phpBB and my Pentium III could handle that without breaking a sweat. The exact same wall of dancing bananas makes any modern CPU jump to ridiculous two-digit usage relative to the task at hand. I was also chatting over IRC from a Palm Pilot which had something on the order of 1MB of RAM, connected over RS232 to a GPRS phone, and the current experience of chat performance is basically on par with that, which boggles the mind given that I now have ten thousand times the RAM, an internet connection that can't be saturated in practice, and latency largely bound by the speed of light. Slack's requirements are completely ludicrous in regard of what it's set to achieve. > it'll be the same on every application. Except, it's not. Counterexamples of chat apps with reasonable to stellar performance abound over the last two decades.
walrus01 4y ago
Except that I can play a 4k 60fps 100Mbps bitrate HEVC video in vlc with 1/6th of the cpu usage slack needs to display a damned gif
- beiller 4y ago
  I think you'll notice the CPU cannot play 4K 60fps in GIF format. Maybe the problem is literally the format itself, which is terrible. It's too bad something like MPEG or some of the animated PNG / JPEG / WEBM formats never took off for meme-y animated images.
- derekdahmer 4y ago
  I wonder if it would help if Slack converted gifs to MP4s in the background before displaying them, or if the perf problem is in the compositing.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

> it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at 85% usage and begin wasting battery, heating up, spinning fans, etc. There’s a setting to disable animated gifs. Which also disables party parrots and other animated crap emojis. There it is: https://slack.com/help/articles/228023907-Manage-animated-images-and-emoji https://slack.com/help/articles/228023907-Manage-animated-im....

philsnow 4y ago
I also got tired of this especially when I wasn't even looking at Slack but it was not hidden, so it kept animating gifs and emoji etc that I can't see. Hammerspoon let me just disable them whenever I was on battery power: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/4086e07b28d8d3cd17f5bf81ff85357f https://gist.github.com/philsnow/4086e07b28d8d3cd17f5bf81ff8...