31–40 of 241 posts
Please use Discord for chat, but don't use it as your main platform, please! Rant over.
There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one. Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these: * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; * using 99% CPU; * to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected; * Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it. * too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the lo…
> attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; Isn't that for showing what game you're running as your status? If you turn that feature off it should stop doing that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM. Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB RAM just to run a chat app reliably. Where did we go wrong?
We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/ . I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.
But it still surprises me that Discord of all seems to care so little about the resource footprint on their users devices. Considering that Discord is still mostly used for gaming you would expect that users want the communication app's system footprint to be absolutely minimal and without any negative impact on the actual game. Thats why I always loved teamspeak so much
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM. Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB RAM just to run a chat app reliably. Where did we go wrong?
We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/ . I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.
You would think with all the apps that use Electron this is something that would be fixed (I don't know if the root cause is Electron itself or some bad practice that people who use it do often enough that I've mentally associated it with the framework) but I've seen this issue with every Electron app I've used for any period of time (except VSCode) for years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because a) people want high resolution, and b) software development is cutting corners like building on electron. Lastly, Discord has absolutely the worst software engineering behind it.
It's not about cutting corners. It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer. That being said I would love to have less memory allocation on my devices when effectively idle too.
One might consider these as cutting corners - hiring web developers to build an app that really should be native
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because a) people want high resolution, and b) software development is cutting corners like building on electron. Lastly, Discord has absolutely the worst software engineering behind it.
It's not about cutting corners. It's about time to effect change. It's about cross device and platform support. It's about it being easier to find developers familiar with the browser stack then native app developer. That being said I would love to have less memory allocation on my devices when effectively idle too.
If you want to do things properly, you hire separate teams who do native development for each platform, or you hire one Qt team for desktop and two teams for the two app platforms. Of course that's expensive, but again developer vs user side. That's what I mean by cutting corners.
And regarding electron there are different kinds of apps performance wise, like Atom vs VS Code. Discord is more on the Atom side of things, sadly.
Discord is also so big, that interested people develop lean third party clients for it. It's possible, but Discord rather bans them and forces users on the worse electron/web alternative.
There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one. Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these: * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; * using 99% CPU; * to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected; * Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it. * too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the lo…
I think HN may have solved one of my most annoying technology mysteries... Definitely taking discord out of automatic startup. Moving back to teamspeak or some other system is quickly becoming a thing for me. I used to run a TS3 server for years.
There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one. Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these: * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; * using 99% CPU; * to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected; * Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it. * too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the lo…
So then I guess the advice is, if you have to use Discord, stick to the web version?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friend group started using Discord during the pandemic to continue our previously-in-person RPG sessions. I don't know how people find it tolerable. It'd kill the battery of a Macbook that could handle 6-8 hours of actual work (this is pre-M1) or 10ish hours of playing Netflix or whatever, in 2 hours flat, fans whirring madly the whole time. WTF. And it wasn't just one of us, and it wasn't just Macs, anyone on a b…
It's because a) people want high resolution, and b) software development is cutting corners like building on electron. Lastly, Discord has absolutely the worst software engineering behind it.
This cannot be any serious part of the reason, since literally playing 3D video games fullscreen at full resolution can use less power than Discord.
[EDIT] For that matter, any streaming video platform. They're ~all extremely battery-efficient even when pushing 4k.