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A comment on Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by bartread on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @07:57PM (#16541374)
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/ (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/. 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by jsmthrowaway on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @08:40PM (#16541593)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by benbristow on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @10:06PM (#16541977)
Use a machine with more RAM then. If your machine doesn't have at least 8GB of RAM then you're doing it wrong.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by arbie on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:10PM (#16545778)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by stordoff on Thursday March 08, 2018 @07:17PM (#16548867)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]