Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 323 posts

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#131

Post by krig »

"You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more."

Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G.

edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs:

> A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up drastically, but it will go up. Around 40000 local clients means you'll be expecting some 500MB of RAM. [1]

[1]: http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#132

Post by zobzu »

tbingmann wrote: post #8

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

+300.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#133

Post by zobzu »

ex3ndr wrote: post #119
tbingmann wrote: post #8

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

We ( https://actor.im ) are actually working on this, but not trying to connect slack, but building telegram, skype, whatsapp, social networks to one, slack like interface that will help you easily manage communications from many networks. This is not our main feature, just something like side project.

that would be great. what would be greater though is ensuring that actor.im cannot read the data as it transits (or easy to setup on our own local machines)

I'd pay a good bit for that!

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#134

Post by zobzu »

It looks cool that said as usual its "hey I dont like so im just going to code my own incompatible one".

In the end im happy with IRC. Its not the greatest but its the one that just works: Its the one everyone who's an engineer in the business knows how to use, bots work, automation work, and irccloud works if you like webuis.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#135

Post by kevinr »

bachmeier wrote: post #53
tabbott wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246 .

Okay, then given that it's open source, hopefully we'll see a smaller version soon.

Just don't make the mistake I did of running with less than 4 GB and then having a flash crowd show up. You really want the RAM for acceptable performance with a reasonable number of concurrent users.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#136

Post by tabbott »

sinak wrote: post #130

My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server? I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted…

I think there are two approaches one could take for doing this:

* It seems like one way you could make that possible would be to make it really easy to do white-label builds of the Zulip mobile apps. E.g. the "Zulip for example.com" app. Would be more overhead than is ideal for smaller deployments.

* It should be possible to have APNS/GCM traffic go through a central community-hosted service that dispatches the messages on to a set of configured Zulip servers.

We actually had functionality based on a similar concept for the Zulip desktop app login process, where it would query a service on zulip.com with e.g. "example.com" and that would return the URL of what zulip server hosts example.com, so that users don't need to fill that out in the login process.

For the open source release, we replaced this with in an explicit "what server are you doing prompt" but it would certainly be technically possible to go this route.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#137

Post by rikkus »

shanemhansen wrote: post #95
JoshM33k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company. I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.

Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, but we don't want to use a public server), where I can get commercial support, if there's a nice client (like irccloud is) for mobiles - there's a long list, unfortunately.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#138

Post by tabbott »

krig wrote: post #131

"You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more." Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G. edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs: > A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up…

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246.

Historically most users were using the single cloud installation at zulip.com, and so having this significant fixed memory overhead wasn't a problem.

I expect someone will do the work the fix this before long; it shouldn't be hard.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#139

Post by twic »

zyxley wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. > and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).

> There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. That's kind of a weird statement to me, because every time I've sold a techie-type person on Slack it's been by describing it as "private IRC with persistent history and a bunch of other neat things".

private IRC. Hence global interoperability and federation is not what this and Slack are aiming to do.
Post reply on HN