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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

Atom and Slack often get critiqued for their use of an HTML5 stack. I'd also like better performance when it comes to startup time, memory usage and responsiveness regarding interactions (I'm using a 12" Macbook) but the stack is so useful and universal that it is here to stay and worth figuring out how to get to great performance (similar to how Emacs figured out how to work around slow startup).

Are there examples for HTML5 apps that manage to have great performance? Are there inherent limits?

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If you look outside first world countries, yes. Check out the progressive web apps talks in Google IO 2017 - most of the examples on stage were indian companies flipkart.com, housing.com and a few others. I work on www.justickets.in myself.

We have a huge Android market here, but they're all phones with very low storage and slow 3G connections, so the default way to get an 'app' out is a HTML5 progressive web app. And the companies here work hard to make things run fast and smooth on slow devices.

Anecdotal, I remember a few months back someone showed here on HN "skytorrents.in", which I assume was made by an Indian, it was blazzingly fast.

I'm not sure how effective it is but I always liked the idea of forcing engineers to use those 3g speeds 1 day a week so they are more inclined to support those customers. Iirc FB does this to some degree, but I think they have a different lightweight version of FB intended for those audiences

Sounds good, but in my experience 3g also varies by an order of magnitude (5 KB/s - 50 KB/s).

When I have 20-50 KB/s stable 3g, browsing the web is a bit slow, but most sites work pretty good. Also messenger aren't a problem.

But working below 20 KB/s is a pain.

Chrome dev tools has a reasonable connection bandwidth simulator. Is there a good one that also simulates variability / packet loss in addition to bandwidth caps?

Yup – I love this idea. I actually occasionally test my single page apps under 3g connections to see how the loading experience works.

It'd be nice to have a simple way to limit a chrome tab's available CPU in the same way. The computers, tablets and phones most people browse on are an order of magnitude slower than the desktop machines we use to develop.

You can throttle the CPU in Chrome Devtools

Yeah I remember back in India page speed was a real concern not because google could penalize you but the network speed was so slow. Not sure now but back then Bsnl used to suck big time.

After coming to Australia, everyone here treats +4mb websites as normal which was a real mind twister for me. Thankfully pagespeed has always been my concern regardless of network speeds due to my 'conditioning' years ago.

> similar to how Emacs figured out how to work around slow startup

By dumping binaries, creating emacsclient, but mostly by waiting 25+ years for fast computers w/SSDs to come along?

I love emacs, but slow startup was a problem for multiple decades, IMO.

The emacs analogy is a terrible one. I start emacs once a month (or longer). I start slack once a day, sometimes more.

Discord is pretty snappy, even with tons of users..

It's pretty buggy, though. On Windows, at least once a day it resizes down to a window only big enough to hold the X button to close the window. And it drains the hell out of my battery on Android.

VS Code performs well.

I'll second this.

There's been articles on HN specifically about how slow VS Code is, particularly the one about rendering cursor blinking, and of course anything running on Electron will never compete work the likes of vim, &c.

However, as Electron apps go, I've found it noticeably faster and less resource intensive than any others. Slack in particular is comparatively terrible, as was Atom in the past (people have said it's improved but I've not felt the need to try it again recently)

I've turned my vim into a monstrosity with plugins in the past - believe me, it's possible to make your vim just as laggy :)

Currently running Slack App, Atom App, and Spotify App on my MBP. According to my system stats, I'm consuming 3GB of RAM across the entire system (OS and all of the above).

So what I would like to know is wtf everyone is doing in these apps to create this CRAZY amount of resource hogging they keep bitching about? Or are they rockin chomebooks? Seriously? I want to know where all of this nonsense is coming from?

Fun Fact! The Spotify desktop client is written in C++! https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-behind-the-Spot....

But I agree, Atom and Slack are really useful to if they consume another 250mb of ram because "It's not optimal", let them use it.

The view layer is powered by Chromium Embedded Framework, so it's not entirely C++.

Very true! I wonder how much more efficient the c++ makes the app in contrast to the node based electron infrastructure

Most of the time Slack is behaving quite well but I've experience it running into 80+% CPU for long periods of time while eating 2-3GiB of RAM, I always forced quit and didn't bother. But yes, sometimes it turns into a resource hog, same with VSCode or Atom, something sometimes makes them feel unresponsive and "laggy".

At least on Windows Slack is very memory-hungry, here's mine right now on my work laptop: http://i.imgur.com/76RQeHv.png

No idea why, it's only joining one team with under 20 people and ~5 channels.

That is a crazy amount of resource hogging at 3GB.

You're running a music player, a text editor (or IDE), and a chat client. I would expect reasonably that would use less memory. One point you could make is that even native application alternatives, ones that don't use Electron, would be bloated and I would have to agree. Visual Studio .NET is pretty darn slow/cumbersome itself.

Back in 1999 I was running Emacs, xchat and freeamp on my Pentium 66 with 16Mb of RAM. (an weak machine, even for 1999 but with Linux Mandrake and WindowMaker it was usable) The UI was less sophisticated and it doesn't involve network connection but sometimes I'm wondering how did we get there...

> doesn't involve network connection

In my very limited experience, this makes programming anything several times more complicated. Writing a document editor? Difficult. Writing a networked, multi-user document editor? As difficult as the last thing but with asynchrony and lots of new failure modes.

A lot of this comes back to higher expectations: we now have much larger displays, color depths, instead of simple bitmap fonts we have much higher-quality rendered vectors with advanced layout systems which can complex scripts, etc. Instead of rendering into a shared buffer, each window has at least one (on OS X, two) full buffers and the whole thing is composited, which is great for responsiveness and visual quality but definitely uses In the 90s, 640x480 was a common display resolution — now Apple recommends that developers ship 512x512 icons.

That's not to say that there aren't decisions to reconsider about code size, resource formats, etc. but I think it's easy to forget how much more behaviour has moved into our default baseline assumptions.

3GB of RAM is precious (and I say that as someone who has 128GB)!

Your bar should not be, "Well, I don't see a slowdown." Many people still develop software on computers with only 8GB total RAM. Throw in a browser and one or two more applications and you're getting close to exhausting that.

Eventually you are going to exhaust your memory resources; using software with poor performance constraints is (in my opinion) inherently antagonistic to a development machine. That's not to say I'm against desktop JavaScript/HTML5 apps categorically, I just think they need much better optimization.

how's that even possible? I mean just the kernel + mds_store and mdworker of mac take like 2gb of memory.

I also run two java processes with 1gb predefined (well probably I could fine tune them to use 512mb). and one angular/cli which accounts for 800mb. plus my database which got 500mb aswell.

spotify on mac used way more than 500mb memory, the last time I used it and also had an extreme amount of i/o pressure. atom actually did use at least 500 mb memory as well, with just the c# plugin.

Slack on my computer, with five teams, consumes 1.8gb of RAM.

Microsoft Word, with a multi-page complicated document, is using 200mb.

Just because we _have_ the resources to allow applications to bloat doesn't mean we should be alright with it. Its a similar argument to electric versus ICE cars; just because gas is cheap doesn't mean we shouldn't support EVs. EVs are fundamentally better for the future.

If we focus on performance optimizing the apps we use, it opens up a wide range of new computing hardware. You make fun of chromebooks, but imagine how much more interesting your work would be if you could use a machine with that performance. Battery life would be substantially higher. The cost of the machine would be substantially lower. The only reason most people need massive performance beasts is because we've pushed abstraction hell and bad engineering practices, so all of our tools suck.

Docker is another offender in recent times. Its great if you're on Linux, but few people are. So on OSX, we need to run a VM, so there goes another gig of memory.

Plenty. Discord, VSCode, and MongoBooster are all apps that I feel hit 90% of native performance while still being based on web tech. Hyper terminal is another one which has very specific reproducible performance issues, but overall is pretty great and fast.

Its incompetence on behalf of Slack and Github, not the tech itself.

I've always found Fastmail's mobile app to be amazingly native-like even though it uses HTML5.

I honestly don't understand why you need a desktop app to run chat.

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