When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop

Re:When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop by floatingatoll on Monday July 22, 2019 @05:52PM (#20502654)

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.)

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Re:When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop by chrismorgan on Monday July 22, 2019 @06:33PM (#20502910)

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.

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Re:When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop by bhl on Monday July 22, 2019 @07:24PM (#20503212)

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.

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Re:When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop by floatingatoll on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @04:59PM (#20510151)

You can browse their memory usage in rather explicit detail about Firefox about:memory, but that assumes a rather high level of preexisting knowledge.

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