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Slack was down

status.slack.com

201–210 of 243 posts

Re: Slack was down

#201
post #59

January is the only month that slack didn't have a downtime this year. They must have some serious infrastructure issue.

Usage climbing as they become a mainstream choice... what we call a "nice problem to have".

Of course they do have some funded fast followers now; eager to take on any defecting users.

Re: Slack was down

#202
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.

Is it? Memory exists to be used.

Yeah, but I run Firefox, Slack, Skype, Discord and VirtualBox. Together they can peak at like 10 GB when stars align badly and I only have 8 GB RAM.

Re: Slack was down

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My deploy on our staging environment fails because the bot can't post the deployment status update on Slack, so yeah, there's that.

...sounds like you need to revisit your CI pipeline. Your build shouldn't fail when your chat tool is down.

Yep, made a ticket about it :)

Re: Slack was down

#205
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run VSCode, Slack, Discord, GitHub, and my company's own app. There are others out there that I would use but my memory pressure is already too high.

Plenty of popular project management / task-tracking tools are very memory heavy too, and also so slow to load that one's reluctant to close their tab(s). Plus if I close them I sometimes have trouble finding WTF I need again. Jira, Asana, both major offenders. Can easily eat many hundreds of MB of memory. It's entirely fucking absurd for what they do and the content they deal with. Harsh (and harsher) language justi…

While don't have any info or even anectada about the other, JIRA is even more bloated on the server side - we had JIRA hosted on premises and it was used mainly for tasks and tickets in a team of 5 people. This "metric" (team size) limits the amount of tasks/tickets that would be processed. Anyway, the JIRA itself needed 2 cores and 8 GB of ram just for that. This is really even beyond absurd.

Re: Slack was down

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually the status bar appears saying they're having an issue.

Hmmmm, I have 3 workspaces, 1 is paid for, and I got this message only in the paid one :D Is it stated in the pricing page that you get better error handling if you pay?

I didn't get it for either the paid one or the free one so it might be a coincidence.

Re: Slack was down

#207
post #163
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, of course not. Neither adding some minor extra features (that make a huge difference for the end-user) nor profiting from it is bad. My concern was that there is so much good tech that is not being utilized just because it lacks enterprisey look and marketing attention. Take slack as an example: ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend (use any existing web irc client and integrate…

> ircd with logging enabled + elastic search/sphinx/lucene + web frontend Slack is way more than that, though. My recollection is that even the initial version of Slack was more than that. At this point, it's enough that "let's extend ircd" isn't exactly a practical answer. Either they maintain their own incompatible fork of ircd or they try to force their business desires into the irc protocol. There's plenty of thi…

While you are obviously right, I still believe that the MVP one weekend project I described in parent post would still cover a large fraction of use-cases. You could then improve on that and add some "minor" (minor in the sense of dev-time) improvements like syntax highlighting using some free (as in beer) libs for that. I am not trying to imply that I could "clone" Slack over the weekend by putting together ircd+elastic and then adding some JS cruft on top of that. But I do imply that just that would be enough as an MVP and as something that would make usage of self-hosted IRC possible for a wider, non-technical audience. I also believe that this itself would cover the functionality actually used by many slack users (at least my personal anecdata from 8 smallish companies supports that) And I also can't stress this enough: I am not trying to say that Slack was created over the weekend or devalue a really impressive and massive effort they've put to get the scale, the functionality and the UX.

Re: Slack was down

#208
post #144
post #27

" Some workspaces might be experiencing issues with messages sending and loading." (emphasis mine) Is that marketing-speak to lessen the loss of trust?

It's only down in the US

I’m in Sweden and it was down for me. My workspace is almost exclusively used in Sweden.

(Exception being 3 guys in the UK and one guy in the US, who is not an admin or owner)

Re: Slack was down

#209

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 un…

discord is also primary on GCP, afaik?

Re: Slack was down

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can honestly say that I have never checked or cared about how much RAM Slack uses. Or any other software for that matter. It's certainly not an issue that I'd use as the basis for deciding which team communication tool to use.

Yeah see the people that are caring about this are caring because it has used up all of their available RAM, has pushed stuff into Virtual Memory, and it is causing performance problems for their system. Or, if they are IT, it is causing performance problems on their users' systems. This is a pretty reasonable complaint when you're talking about a system with 2gb, and a chat application that uses 1.5gb of memory...or…

"Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597
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