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Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#31

Post by e12e »

I quickly abandoned the slack "App", but even dedicating a chromium tab to Slack ended up being absurdly heavy. So I've finally migrated to weechat+weechat slack plugin. For a moment I thought I was too late, as slack is killing the xmpp and irc bridges - but the dedicated slack plugin for weechat uses the slack api.

As an added bonus, there are no more animated emojis in my peripheral vision that can be mistaken for an update / alert.

I'm on Linux, but I presume wc works fine on Mac. A bit of a shame that the qt-based client seems abandoned - but it's open source and python so maybe it'll pick up some steam for those that want something a bit less console only, but still not Web app crappy.

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

https://github.com/weechat/weechat

https://github.com/weechat/qweechat

I imagine that both for the console client and the qt one it should be possible to map some of the more common emojis to Unicode (eg :heart:).

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#34

Post by taneq »

e12e wrote: post #31

I quickly abandoned the slack "App", but even dedicating a chromium tab to Slack ended up being absurdly heavy. So I've finally migrated to weechat+weechat slack plugin. For a moment I thought I was too late, as slack is killing the xmpp and irc bridges - but the dedicated slack plugin for weechat uses the slack api. As an added bonus, there are no more animated emojis in my peripheral vision that can be mistaken for…

I don't have a horse in the slack/xmpp race (although I do hope open standards win out) but if they have a public API which lets you do all that, would it be easy enough to build an XMPP gateway?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#35

Post by lojack »

d3ckard wrote: post #4

104 MB at the moment. For me at least, Slack really got their shit together sometime last year and improved the issue significantly. I still remember having to restart Slack twice a day, but it ain't issue anymore.

Would probably help to say how many slack organizations you’re using. I’m on around 6, and Slack almost always takes up a big chunk of memory. I suspect those with less resource usage are in fewer orgs, but it’s hard to say.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#36

Post by lojack »

phereford wrote: post #25
enraged_camel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. The web client has feature parity with the desktop client so I haven’t understood why people bother with the latter.

It does not have complete feature parity. One of the things missing, that is important for me and the team I am on, is the ability to share screens and allow for remote control in that session. That is a Mac App only right now, at least the last time I checked.

Now that screenhero is no more, screen sharing is literally the only reason one of my teams use slack. We use hipchat (not by choice) for the rest of our communication.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#37

Post by api »

framel wrote: post #26

Electron is cancer

We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron.

Qt? No mobile, slower development.

Java? No mobile, deployment nightmare, Oracle cooties, and often just as heavy as Electron.

Native UI? Out of the question. We don't have anywhere near the resources to develop our app four to five times, implement every new feature four to five times, etc.

Others are some combination of immaturity, lack of mobile support, out of date, lack of support for internationalization and accessibility, etc.

I agree that Electron is cancer, but until there's a better game in town it's the only thing that could possibly meet our needs.

We would pay for a better option, but unfortunately there are probably not enough of us to make another option economically viable. Nobody pays for developer tools so it's an awful market for startups, and a modern UI API with cross platform capability is just too much work for independent open source efforts.

My dream would be a really clean cross platform UI library that lets you develop in a language like Go or Rust.

UI development in 2018 is a sad state of affairs. It was better in many ways in the 1990s and early 2000s. We had wxWidgets and Qt then and they were decent. Mobile "ruined" it by introducing another incredibly popular UI paradigm that rendered literally everything written to date obsolete.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#38

Post by w0utert »

makkesk8 wrote: post #29

to be fair, this is not an electron issue as vscode runs fine on all platforms. I don't really want to bash the devs but... Maybe they should take a look at it.

I have vscode open with a relatively small project here, and excluding the CPP tools it sits at about ~500M used. If I include the CPP tools it's about ~1.5GB. Not as bad as Slack, but I wouldn't call it 'fine' considering that it's just an editor.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#39

Post by Koshkin »

znpy wrote: post #22
acd wrote: post #21

FreeBSD an entire operating system runs on about 100MB ram. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall-hardware.htm...

CentOS 7 is roughly the same. For a minimal install (with ssh service and vsftpd), i booted it and flushed the filesystem cache, then ram usage was about 88MB.

Heh, the recommended amount of RAM to run Windows 95 was 8MB.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory?

#40

Post by framel »

api wrote: post #37
framel wrote: post #26

Electron is cancer

We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron. Qt? No mobile, slower development. Java? No mobile, deployment nightmare, Oracle cooties, and often just as heavy as Electron. Native UI? Out of the question. We don't have anywhere near the resources to develop our app four to five times, implement every new feature four to f…

https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/
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