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Slack was down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack was down

#111

Post by komali2 »

notnull wrote: post #88

Is it really that hard to spin up an IRC server for moments like these? I too have had to switch to Skype communications today. I wish people used IRC in the first place so I could write my own bots.

I've been meaning to figure out how to do this for my office. From what I can understand, setting up the IRC server is easy, making it "secure" is kinda hard, getting slack features like shared history (so you can log out, back in, and see your messages) is fairly hard. I've only done cursory glancing over blogs though.

Also I would need to help my coworkers choose and settle on a client. Particularly one for the phone. I used to use androidIRC but I kept getting booted from channels cause when it was in my pocket it would spam connect/disconnects.

Re: Slack was down

#112

Post by mr__y »

freehunter wrote: post #36
derwiki wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing one proprietary service to federated and open services? I'm not following you

It doesn't really matter how open and federated email is if all mail in/out of your mailbox has to go through one provider. If my company's Exchange server went down, email would stop. Likewise for Internet service... if my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed.

I used to work for a relatively small dev-shop (9 persons) and we had two independent internet connections from two providers to avoid such problems. This was because done that way because there was only one fiber provider that wasn't really reliable (3+ hours downtimes every 1-2 months) and mobile tethering wasn't really an option as well because of nearby powerlines that made the reception quite a problem - to the point where our sales guy had to go outside the building during some calls. Luckily there was a second ISP - not really fast (10mbps was the best they could do) and quite expensive (we've paid more than twice more for that 10mbps than for a gigabit fiber), but still cheaper than having 9 people not able to work while waiting for the "main" ISP to solve their problems.

Re: Slack was down

#113

Post by farisjarrah »

mr__y wrote: post #48
freehunter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I love it. I work for a mostly-remote company and before Slack we had an IM product but it was a 1:1 chat. Having an always-on chat room for the entire team, knowing other teams use the same product and I can pop into their chat room, spinning up channels for project teams, etc. It's been a huge boost to our company. And since so many companies have settled on the same solution, when I'm working with a client I…

It seems that you could take any old-school internet tech, add some flashy GUI, slap "for enterprise" label and you get a great and popular solution that solves the problem noone ever could solve. Maybe it's time for gopher for enterprise

Lots of old technology is really good but has a bad user interface. There is something to be said for packaging up something in a nice, good looking, easy to use way. I mean, look at how many companies use Sumologic and hosted ElasticSearch for log ingestion. Theoretically speaking, with grep, regex and python you could make all the graphs and charts yourself, there is no real reason to purchase these (pretty expensive) services if you are willing to put in the work. The problem is the amount of work required to do what you say successfully is massive.

Re: Slack was down

#114

Post by brynjolf »

allana wrote: post #76
nixgeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low. This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.

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...

Re: Slack was down

#115

Post by allana »

freehunter wrote: post #56
diegoperini wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is appropriate if Slack being down affects software other than Slack. We can learn how to avoid outages in our own products happening due to 3rd party services such as Slack becoming unavailable.

I would love if threads like this became "how to make your Slackbots more resilient" or "high-availability messaging by archiving your Slack threads" or an actually interesting conversation topic. Instead of just complaining that Slack is popular and on-premise solutions never have technical problems, I'd love to hear some real solutions.

I've been fairly content with Matrix, the ecosystem has improved massively in the last couple months, reducing resource usage on the server I use and adding additional e2e encrypted clients besides Riot.

Bridges are also super handy for integrating with IRC, Slack and similar.

Re: Slack was down

#116

Post by namelosw »

I remember there's a Slack architecture case study by AWS[0]. I was a little bit surprised that the architecture can hold such huge traffic.

As a comparison, Discord use's tech stack is more niche and cutting edge[1], but they seem to know very well what they are doing.

It's interesting because AWS use Slack's architecture as a case study because it's a little bit mediocre, that their major potential customers can understand and use. I just don't think AWS will ever use Discord's architecture as a case study...

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/ [1] https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b

Re: Slack was down

#117

Post by hartator »

mslate wrote: post #78

Any alternatives to Slack with parity screensharing functionality? Being able to draw on the screen is so valuable for remote pair programming—Hangouts/Skype don’t cut it

Same. Slack is also dropping their screen sharing feature. Which make looking for a replacement more pressing.

Re: Slack was down

#118

Post by ashelmire »

ravedave5 wrote: post #9

Since twitter went down the other week hackernews is now the primary 'is it down?' news site.

I use https://downdetector.com/

I've often experienced issues with sites that say "everything's sunshine and rainbows" on their status pages, only to find that many other customers are experiencing the same problem.

Re: Slack was down

#119

Post by xeromal »

timdorr wrote: post #81
allana wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low. This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.

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.

Half a gig for IRC + gifs

Re: Slack was down

#120

Post by totaldude87 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #95
totaldude87 wrote: post #89

Now we can put slack into the list of Major league tech companies which cannot keep the services up and running 24/7. Cloudflare Facebook and its group of companies Azure cloud Google Cloud , twitter etc etc AWS, eyes are you now :)

S3 went down for nearly an entire workday a few years ago. It legit pretty much broke everything. We all went home because there was no way to do any work.

oh yeah, Netflix was down along with a loads of companies when aws had its issues, but the list i put out was the ones in last few months ;)
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