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Comment by dubswithus | Hacker News Reader

I remember people on HN complaining about responsiveness. Never found it to be a problem personally.

it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at 85% usage and begin wasting battery, heating up, spinning fans, etc.

if somebody told me twenty years ago how powerful this CPU was, relative to what I was using at the time for a desktop PC, and that a chat application could pretty much max out the CPU and use multi gigs of RAM, I would have laughed...

What does that have to do with Slack? If your computer has trouble playing high frame rate video it'll be the same on every application.

It's not just high framerate stuff, it's pervasive.

Folks used to post walls of dancing bananas in phpBB and my Pentium III could handle that without breaking a sweat.

The exact same wall of dancing bananas makes any modern CPU jump to ridiculous two-digit usage relative to the task at hand.

I was also chatting over IRC from a Palm Pilot which had something on the order of 1MB of RAM, connected over RS232 to a GPRS phone, and the current experience of chat performance is basically on par with that, which boggles the mind given that I now have ten thousand times the RAM, an internet connection that can't be saturated in practice, and latency largely bound by the speed of light.

Slack's requirements are completely ludicrous in regard of what it's set to achieve.

> it'll be the same on every application.

Except, it's not. Counterexamples of chat apps with reasonable to stellar performance abound over the last two decades.

Except that I can play a 4k 60fps 100Mbps bitrate HEVC video in vlc with 1/6th of the cpu usage slack needs to display a damned gif

I think you'll notice the CPU cannot play 4K 60fps in GIF format. Maybe the problem is literally the format itself, which is terrible. It's too bad something like MPEG or some of the animated PNG / JPEG / WEBM formats never took off for meme-y animated images.

I wonder if it would help if Slack converted gifs to MP4s in the background before displaying them, or if the perf problem is in the compositing.

> it's an obscenity that somebody pasting one high frame rate GIF into a slack channel can cause a quad-core, tenth generation core i7 laptop CPU to peg itself at 85% usage and begin wasting battery, heating up, spinning fans, etc.

There’s a setting to disable animated gifs. Which also disables party parrots and other animated crap emojis.

There it is: https://slack.com/help/articles/228023907-Manage-animated-im....

I also got tired of this especially when I wasn't even looking at Slack but it was not hidden, so it kept animating gifs and emoji etc that I can't see. Hammerspoon let me just disable them whenever I was on battery power:

https://gist.github.com/philsnow/4086e07b28d8d3cd17f5bf81ff8...

For a very long time (ive not checked recently) slack used more memory that my IDE on a multimillion line c++ project. I used to have to shut down slack to compile on a machine with 128GB ram.

I think it improved quite a lot. I’ve just checked and it’s using 58mb on my Windows 11 workstation.

It definitely has improved. It was clear from the memory usage vs community size that they were doing something that scaled with community size. This is a guess, but something like loading every single user and their profile icon into memory.

> I think it improved quite a lot.

Maybe on Windows. My work machine (running Big Sur) currently shows:

Slack: 251.6MB

Slack Helper: 10.2MB

Slack Helper: 48.3MB (Yes, there are two of them)

Slack Helper (GPU): 316.2MB

Slack Helper (Renderer): 350.4MB

So just shy of a gig of RAM for chat.

How many gigs was it using?

At least in my case, I once caught Slack.exe on windows using 40GB of RAM. (My machine had 32GB, so you can imagine how well things were running.) The allocated space seemed to have mostly been zeroes since the Windows Kernel was able to compress a bunch of the pages to avoid running out, but it was putting so much strain on things that audio playback was dropping out.

I've changed jobs since so I don't have access to the tickets but I remember it being close to 20GB.

I have 300-500ms response when clicking a channel. It’s infuriating. This happens on any browser including Electron.

that and the keyboard lag is quite noticeable (even in an m1 machine)

what is going on in software where you cant even compose text in realtime...

After trying microsoft teams, slack feels like a thing from the future.

But try using weechat+weeslack (+ url_hint, so that you can download urls and see images with a single shortcut) as one example of how I consider a chap app should feel.

I remember pidgin being in a similar ballpark, but I haven't used it in years.

It's a shame most other modern chat clients (ripcord, and most matrix clients) do not come even remotely close.

Well, it's a problem for me, though definitely less than it was, so I'm personally very happy that this exists. "voting with our wallets" might make Slack put it on the prio board.

Right now I'm using wee_slack.py which integrates weechat with slack; though with the obvious trade-offs.

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