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.

(Gmail uses 250MB at runtime in the same Firefox instance, for comparison; I didn't test it in an Electron-like container.)

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.

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.

Which makes perfect sense. If you're operating on more memory than should be necessary you're gonna be burning a lot more processor/battery than is reasonable, too.

I honestly think that most people us use phrases like "webtech junk" are offended on principle and not because of any measurable difference that matters to regular users.

I guess if my principle is that I like my computer to respond quickly and accurately to my input then yeah, I dislike webtech junk on principle.

[EDIT] as far as it not mattering, everyone I know, including plenty of non-techies, who has used Google Docs hates it, due to the UI lag. Typing with that large a delay between keypress and the letter appearing sucks. They may use it anyway because they have to, but they all complain about how laggy the UI is, responding to clicks and keypresses.

I think it is because it expires caches left and right, loses track of events, or I have no idea what else could be going on on a PC with 16GB RAM (plenty of it free) and stable Internet connection.

Try telegram on desktop and compare the UI performance. Slack definitely has UI lag. Not nearly as bad as Teams though.

The reasons:

- Cache. RAM may be >8GB but the CPU L1 cache is just 64kB. And L1 cache is about 100 times faster than RAM. From my experience, proper cache management is by far the most important low level optimization, and most of it can be archived by just using less RAM.

- What are you doing with all that RAM? 250MB in absolute terms is huge. The entire Harry Potter series is around 5MB uncompressed. For that size you can also have a 1080p fullscreen RGB image, uncompressed. What it means is that unless you are working with large datasets, these 250MB represent a huge amount of stuff you don't control. Lots of moving parts with potential performance bottlenecks, security issues, etc...

- Every byte your app is using is one less byte for your system caches. Wasting RAM makes your whole system go slower.

- Finally, an ethical argument. Your chat app will run continuously on millions of PCs. On that PC are libraries, kernel code and frameworks where people worked hard squeezing every bit of performance they could. Saving energy and making your apps run to their full potential. For me, a background app made by a company the size of Slack have a duty to be as light as possible, as not to interfere with the actual work people are doing on their machine.

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.

Ram is cheap. Usage at this scale just doesn't matter to the vast majority of users.

“It only uses 8% of 8GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” is soon phrased as “It only uses 8% of 16GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” and soon after etc, etc

At some point, preferably before we start saying “it’s just half a terabyte of RAM to run a chat app”, we may want to step back and question this circular justification for ever increasing bloat and ask ourselves when enough is enough. There’s been no real gain in functionality in the past 10-20 years of chat app churn, just an enormous explosion in RAM and CPU requirements.

Perhaps you aren't giving credit to functionality that is important to people other than yourself?

The main, really only, features that Slack has that IRC doesn’t is easy account onboarding and (crucially, for business) offboarding, and persistent messaging. This has been discussed to death, publicly, by organizations like Mozilla. They were also smart enough to offer themselves for free to startups, which largely undermined hipchat, which had the same basic value proposition over IRC, and allowed them to build a hip reputation and network effects in the startup crowd.

Are we really going to pretend that those features are why the Slack client consumes tons of RAM and a fuckload of CPU cycles? They’re entirely server side, for christ’s sake.

ICQ could do all of the above on a 32 Meg Mac 20 years ago. The bloat isn’t related to the reasons it “won”, or why it continues to be popular. Network effects, the fact that if your company mandates it you have no alternative, simply insulates them from suffering many ill-effects of their bloated, laggy client software.

But sure, ok, so let’s hear your theory on why they got big and how it requires all of this client side RAM usage. So what is it?

Mostly what drove orgs I’ve been with from one to another has been pricing (Slack having a free tier ate Hipchat’s lunch, like I said), and “buzz”. Slack was the hip thing to get on in 2013.

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.

And no, not even with 16GB will I tolerate what slack uses even with their new version.

Yes, I do consider upgrading the ram myself by replacing the soldered ram-chips. And do not for a second imagine I'm doing that so that I can send text messages@!

Lot's more options in PCs obviously, but 2 minutes of googling found a 16GB XPS13 $580 more than the 8GB version. Again, not $1000. I'm sure with slightly more searching there are cheaper options as well.

For reference I bought 64GB for my workstation for less than $400 a few years ago. And that's with 25% sales tax.

Desktop memory is cheaper, laptop manufacturers are rent seeking with upgrades normally, and with soldered memory they have free reign.

It’s true that often the upgrades are bundled, ie; can’t get 16GiB without an i7. But I think that’s fairly rare at least.

As for 16GiB, there’s a hard limit there for LPDDR3, and intel CPUs do not support LPDDR4 yet.

Oh, and another thing regarding cost, there were some issues a long time ago with the factories producing them, which is why the price is still high, maybe artificially.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnxb35/the-year-that-the-...

Well, the biggest point of soldered ram has always been to be able to recoup costs by denying people to buy ram from someone else.

Even in the old days it was much cheaper to buy 2 GB of ram and then upgrade to 4 GB than buying it with 4 GB in the first place.

RAM is cheap...and not upgradeable on the majority of devices in the world.

Why should it be reasonable for displaying a few megs of text & maybe a dozen megs of images to take 250MB+ of RAM? What is the rest of that memory usage, and why is it loaded? CPUs don't like executing code that's not in cache, so hopefully it's not code. And if it's not code, what is it? Figure a few dozen MB for the graphic buffers, but where's the other 100MB+ gone?

The problem isn’t with Slack itself - as more and more desktop software run on Electron then with 8GB of RAM you can only have a handful of instances open simultaneously before you get performance- crushing disk paging.

While 250MB is a big chunk... I think it's actually okay, even in this extreme case.

Too high for an app that runs continuously.

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.

People have skewed ideas of what's doable in memory constraints in 2019 for the feature sets that customers tend to expect.

Compare a "media-heavy" slack with that Telegram, or compare with Telegram minimum.

To support that, you'd need far more than a "Hello World" stack.

Personally I would have used those years of development time to go native but it is what it is.

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.

No, what people care about are primarily network effects. They'll use whatever someone in the company decided to use (frequently Slack because it’s always been Slack since someone back in 2013 decided it was the hip choice, before it even had a desktop client), and they’ll put up with whatever dogshit client they’re served, because it’s out of their hands.

And what about Discord? It's almost exclusively used by people in their homes, there is no company pushing it down their throats.