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Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

status.slack.com

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Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#51

This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.

It's not an implementation detail, it's a whole (controversial) UX design pattern: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/true-lies-of-optimi...

Optimistic design is good, but you need to also tell the user when you’re being optimistic. iMessage, for example, “sends” a message, but it will also tell you when it’s been delivered so you can check to make sure.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#52
post #11

Slack is unusable, but it did get me to restart Docker which had ballooned to 16 GB memory and a bazillion processes. Modern software development is something else

waiting the 10 seconds it takes to build a javascript frontend these days always leaves me reminiscing about my highschool days of editing my javascript in notepad and refreshing my browser to instantly see my mistakes.

I understand there are benefits and reasons for the state of affairs...

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good reminder that I needed to do this. Docker for me had gotten up to 13GB even though I have it supposedly limited to 8.

If you are on a Mac you are probably looking at virtual memory because that is what Activity Monitor displays by default.

I was checking with top, but it's the same value. A double restart of the docker engine + changing the memory settings seems to have it holding. It's like an upgrade just ignored the previous setting.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have both Slack and Teams. Almost everyone I know who has an option picks Slack.

I've never used Teams, but if everyone prefers Slack over it, it must be horrible.

Teams is a nightmare. Instead of just creating the simple chat that everyone was just asking for, they went full PhD and created a mix between a chat and a forum.

A Teams "channel" has counter intuitive behavior, the messages you send are more like forum threads, users can reply to them, and when that happens it reorders the whole messages to put that one at the bottom. It makes it impossible to "catch up" on a channel since people will happily reply to any messages so the ordering is completely random.

There is also a completely counter intuitive distinction between "groups chats" and "channels".

Teams is also the only chat service I know where there is an actual limit on the number of non-public channels you can have. After 30 channels have been created, you're doomed.

Want to remove an existing channel to make room for a new one? Nope, you cannot remove a channel, only "archive" them. Archived channels are removed after 30 days and there is no way to force their removal early. So basically if you reach 30 channels you have to wait minimum 30 days to create a new one.

Did I mention the UI is slow as hell, and half the screen space is used by unnecessary large padding between messages? I am rarely able to have more than 3/4 messages displayed on a 23" screen.

The only positive point of Teams is integration with outlook 365 and meetings. It works really well, quality is good, reliable, nice UI, présentation mode, screen share, etc

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in their defence, you can't really know how much the uptime is going to be affected by until the incident is resolved. If it was a live counter then you'd see the uptime go up as the month progresses!

I don't have a problem with it if they update the uptime stats afterwards, but why couldn't it be implemented "live"? Basically time "down" / total time elapsed during $period. At the beginning of the month/quarter/period you'd be at 100% (if they are up at that moment). Or even simpler, just have it be a measurement of a rolling window X days in the past.

Because then the metrics can't be reviewed/vetoed by executives before being published. Optics > accuracy for most organizations, sadly.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#57
post #15

Dear Slack: Your service is down, it's not "slow performance". Be honest to your customers, or I will make sure our team switches to Microsoft Teams.

Didn’t Teams just have a massive outage too?

But they did call it an outage.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#58

This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.

Just experienced this and decided to context switch to hackernews for a few minutes. Ironic that this post is the top on homepage.

That's the opposite of irony, as one would absolutely expect weirdness on Slack to be talked about on HN.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#59

I watched this a while ago, and it did not fill me with confidence for the Slack backend at the time: https://youtu.be/WE9c9AZe-DY

Could someone comment on why exactly this a poor design for their backend? Genuinely curious, I don't have any real world context on systems like this.
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