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Comment by KZeillmann | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I don't get why so many other commenters seem to think a direct listing means the company's all of a sudden about to die or its product is all of a sudden going to turn to crap. If this is the best way to achieve liquidity, that sounds good for them.

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Their product kind of did turn to crap.

30% cpu at idle with 5 accounts.

50% if I enable emojis.

Like I'm sorry but it's essentially IRC. There is zero excuse for being that much of a hog.

You can blame it on electron if you like (I do) but it doesn't change anything for the end user.

> Like I'm sorry but it's essentially IRC.

It's irc with emojis, 2mb animated gifvs, embedded hd video and other complex content rendering. Of course it's using as much ram and cpu as a browser.

Which of course misses the point of why people use Slack over IRC: history without screwing about. I could make do without the emojis, GIFs, video or other content rendering if IRC had history without the need for a constant connection.

>Which of course misses the point of why people use Slack over IRC: history without screwing about.

It's why you use Slack, rather than why people use Slack. I'm sure you could make do without the emojis, GIFs, and videos, but the market says people seem to think otherwise.

To be fair, why he uses Slack is likely due to his employer using Slack.

And the reason his employer uses it is to ensure everyone can interrupt everyone and give each other more work.

Is there a competitor that doesn't have the emojis/gifs/videos? They're easy enough that everyone adds them, so I don't think we can conclude "the market" has made a clear choice.

(Ok, I remember HipChat didn't have gifs but there was a lot else wrong with HipChat)

Those who think Slack is just IRC are the same ones who have been predicting the year of the Linux desktop

And who think Dropbox is just rsync + crontab.

Yea except I'm neither of these people but good job on the strawman arguments.

Slack is nicer than IRC to use. Nobody here is debating that. Slack solves a heap of problems with IRC.

My only point of contention is that there is zero argument for it using the resources it does. None of the mentioned solutions require any more resources than IRC consumes.

We just have a big heaping pile of electron nobody wants to acknowledge as the source of the problem.

I skipped this because the history and search are perceivably done server side

Of course ?

Yes it often makes sense to produce inefficient code for many business reasons (development speed, users don't care, easier platform to deploy to, etc).

However what Slack does would be nowhere near taxing for a modern computer if it were to be done remotely efficiently.

I also use Telegram's desktop app. I wouldn't call it lightweight, but it has the features you list without the resource demands of electron. Dash is currently using more memory on my laptop.

Anecdotal, but with 5 workspaces joined, Slack idles between 0-2% while on the foreground for me.

This is a fairly modest i7 3770k based system. Their work on reigning in runaway CPU usage truly seems to have paid off.

Calling a 3770k modest is a stretch but I have a mobile dual core here (OK, it's a Kaby Lake but still) and also seeing 0% in Task Manager.

If having a six-year-old CPU isn't considered modest, it really says something about the lack of progress in the CPU space.

We discussed this recently: from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake , IPC grew 20%, power consumption dropped brutally. And by Kaby Lake progress has completely stalled due to Intel's inability to switch to 10nm allowing AMD to catch up.

Apparently they've fixed a lot of the CPU issues, it's just still in Beta: https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor...

That was written in July 27 2017. I doubt its still in Beta.

Also adding: Slack Helper eventually goes into a death spiral and uses almost all of the CPU under macOS. I have to force quit it every other day or so. Slack seems to have been doing that for roughly 2 years.

Slightly mitigating data point: Other Electron apps do this too.

I have never had this happen on my mac running Slack.

Perhaps it's down to hardware differences then, assuming that you've got a newish machine. This is a fairly old MacBook Pro which will be replaced soon. Hard to say what the cause is, but I don't have any issues with other non-Electron apps.

Are you new to Slack? People have been joking about the resource demands of the Slack desktop client for years. If anything, that situation is actually improving.

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They weren't saying its just IRC so it isn't a viable business model. They're saying its just IRC so it shouldn't be a CPU hog.

Your link is not really relevant here because it talks of business viability not program performance.

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