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Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

status.slack.com

61–70 of 225 posts

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

#61
post #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...

I just started using Snowpack and it is a godsend. It’s an anti-bundler that puts separate modules into a directory.

Between that and using vscode remote SSH onto my server environment, it’s almost like the old days of save-refresh, but with auto refresh!

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

#62
post #5

I’ve recently taken an interest in data analytics and have been using daily volumes of interruptions I receive via slack (and other sources) as a data set to learn myself on and try to understand how I can be more productive individually. Today’s disruption should provide an interesting data point all of its own.

Do you work for yourself or someone else? If the latter, why do you spend any effort maximizing your efficiency? This is a pattern that I see often on HN. People take an employer's problem (they are wasting the time they've purchased with distractions) and making it their personal problem.

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

#63
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.

Their status page is annoying me more and more with these recent outages.

Recalling the incidents in September, it's a bit cheeky they call that "99.93%" uptime (30 mins of downtime).

Having remembered that there were at _least_ 2 seperate 1 hour+ incidents where I was struggling to send messages in Sept, I went through to look at the history, and they seem to have purposefully hidden these incidents on the calendar. There's no way of listing incidents in a month.

The information and accessibility of the status page is obviously politically motivated by marketing.

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

#64
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.

Its interesting, I looked at that page earlier (~1145 EST) and it was actually tagged as an "Outage" rather than the "Incident" it is right now.

For me it has only been slow performance all morning. Its not good, but not what I would call "down" either. At least from my perspective. I could have a bunch of other folks who are completely unable to send messages and I just can't tell.

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

#66
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately true. About a year ago, I had reported a pod-specific issue to Zendesk (I'm fuzzy on the details). They confirmed the issue but also acknowledged that it would not reflect on status.zendesk.com.

I've questioned status pages since.

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

#67
post #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...

wait i still do that but in vim...

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Broadly speaking maybe, but situationally not really. The likelihood that the issue I'm experiencing is a service wide issue impacting many others is usually low probability.

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

#69

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...

It's pretty necessary to inform users when messages haven't sent though, especially when these little failure indicators are hidden in the channels themselves - i.e you need to be looking at the message to know it failed.

If I post a message in a channel and go back to work, I don't want to find out later when I check for replies that my message didn't actually send - I need a notification!

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

#70
post #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...

10 seconds... heh.

We have build times in the dozens of minutes thanks to a decision in the past to use Dart.

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