They actually just fixed that in 4.0: https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-deskt...

I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4 workspaces.

400MB? Not bad for a chat client that sends a few bytes of text.

Still 10 times more compared to Telegram) Not to mention transfer speed and bandwith usage.

This is on my Mac, whose apps aren't exactly known for memory efficiency.

Fantastical, a calendaring app, is sitting at 333MB.

1Password is taking up 168MB in the background.

Finder, which I don't even have a window open for, is eating 127MB.

I'm not saying 400MB is amazing or anything, but it's a significant drop from the gigs of memory wasted by previous versions.

Aren't your coworkers sharing 10 MB gifs all day long?

The reason I don't like twitter because of all the dumb reaction gifs.

Still can't blame the browser when it consumes a gigabyte of ram, when we ask it to show us a gigabyte of gifs

400MB for what basically is a client for a proprietary version of IRC is ridiculous. How much memory did BitchX use ?

while I don't remember how much memory did BitchX use, I do remember that a whopping 8 megs of ram was enough to run mIRC with 20+ channel tabs without serious glitches. And those precious megs were used not only for the irc client but also for the OS itself.

I have irssi reporting 25232 mem used

Half a gig for IRC + gifs

Seriously. Oh, good, now it's only 4-5x as large as it has any right to be, even allowing for modern software bloat...

Such is the nature of slightly optimized Electron apps, T-Mobile Digits Desktop app is a similar resource hog.

Using the browser based version often is less resource intensive.

Tried that, they actively employ darkpatterns to coerce users onto desktop apps. I even asked them to stop asking for an app install on their links that you open from inside the webapp and they told me to get stuffed and use the desktop app.

Yea, I use Matrix integration when I deal with Slack, that way I have my choice of client and there isn't any code of Slack's running on my machine.

Strange, after declining message about "native" desktop app, I've never seen it again. No other issues as well. Firefox 69 on Windows, one paid and one free workspace.

How is CPU and I/O use on the newest version?

About the same, for my usage.

Ooof, I'd hope they would have improved CPU use when handling lots of GIFs. Tusky and Mastodon's web frontend handle pausing offscreen GIFs pretty well, my fan doesn't spin up at all (unlike Slack's desktop client last I used it).

I can honestly say that I have never checked or cared about how much RAM Slack uses. Or any other software for that matter. It's certainly not an issue that I'd use as the basis for deciding which team communication tool to use.

Yeah see the people that are caring about this are caring because it has used up all of their available RAM, has pushed stuff into Virtual Memory, and it is causing performance problems for their system. Or, if they are IT, it is causing performance problems on their users' systems.

This is a pretty reasonable complaint when you're talking about a system with 2gb, and a chat application that uses 1.5gb of memory...or heck, a 16gb system when you have programs that legitimately need as much memory as you can give them and are being starved of it. Nobody would begrudge this usage if it was necessary for the task, but it isn't. Not even close.

Edit: Apparently this is better than it used to be, but there have been times when Slack also ate up CPU like crazy. Which, again, no biggie if you have plenty to spare, but when you don't...and even then, if you have plenty to spare, you're still going to be annoyed with Slack if it's eating all of your battery because the CPU is working really really really hard at...um...dunno? If it were mining bitcoin/monero without your knowledge or consent then at least it would be DOING something.

CPU nomming is a worse problem IMO, as your fans spin up and battery life shrinks. Other chat clients don't use notable resources, its suprising that Slack hasn't had much pushback over its heavy resource usage thus far.

"Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597

Thank you for the gentle correction. I will now also start using "thrashing" more accurately.

Is this really such a common mistake? What is virtual about putting memory onto a hard drive

In my experience, yes, I see the misconception frequently. I think it stems from Microsoft using the name "Virtual memory size" for swap space in earlier versions of Windows.

Same with MS Teams, and there isn't even a way to disable notifications per channel. So if people ping the channel and you are ini tyou will get a notification. It drives me insane but no progress since August 2018. They did add a way to send unicorns to people though. Priorities...

In MS Teams you can click the '...' next to a channel and then click 'channel notifications'. The options allow you to mute 'all new posts' and also to mute 'channel mentions'.

Their new version seem to use less RAM, it's still Electron but with a lot of lazy-loading's

I'm sitting at 341MB after all day heavy usage, let's not exaggerate here :)

as mentioned in another reply -- the slack client memory hog issue was fixed in the latest update.

zulip is electron also.

Is it? Memory exists to be used.

Yeah, but I run Firefox, Slack, Skype, Discord and VirtualBox. Together they can peak at like 10 GB when stars align badly and I only have 8 GB RAM.