Slack's Desktop App Now Launches 33% Faster, Uses 50% Less Memory

Slack today announced it's deploying an under-the-hood upgrade for its desktop app to boost performance for companies and teams using the app for workplace collaboration. From a report: The latest version of Slack for desktop and internet browsers is due out in the coming weeks and promises a 33% faster launch time, 10 times faster launch of VoIP calls, and roughly 50% less memory usage. The news comes a month after Slack became a public company, listed as WORK on the New York Stock Exchange. Slack product architect and lead of desktop client rewrite Johnny Rodgers said the upgrade takes advantage of changes to Slack's underlying technology, like modern JavaScript tools and techniques and the React UI framework.

Re:

[leonbev]

Yeah, it's kind of a case of "Too little, too late" now. Now that Microsoft has bundled Teams into Office 365, they are stealing Slack's customer base wholesale.

Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks Slashdot! I'm installing this wonderful new and improved app as we speak. Also relaxing with a nice refreshing Pepsi and delicious Dominos Pizza!

4 months ago.

[jellomizer]

Development Team: Can we release the new version of the code, it works much better.
Boss: Lets wait until after we go public. Just in case we need to fire your team, that we we don't have as much complex code to offshore.

Should have used Rust

[goombah99]

it runs 69 times faster than C and it's webscale like Mongo DB

Slashvertisement

[Dan East]

Wow, this is quite revolutionary. Are we going to get slashdot stories when all software in existence gets a bit of an upgrade, or just Slack? In an attempt to actually be on-topic, the real question isn't what miracle Slack pulled off to reduce startup and memory usage, but why it was apparently so grossly inefficient in the first pace.

This is actually News for Nerds

[SuperKendall]

Are we going to get slashdot stories when all software in existence gets a bit of an upgrade,

A) There are a large number of people that use Slack. Especially technical people.

B) Slack is legendary for bloated runtime and memory consumption, I'd say cutting half the memory use is more than a "slight upgrade" and really helps a lot of people out.

I wouldn't want to see news about every upgrade either but this one truly does fall well in the realm of a useful Slashdot story, I will be looking for this release

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It would have been even less heavyweight if it used something like Sciter.

Re:

[PolygamousRanchKid]

This reads like an add for the "Ginsu" knife:

33% faster launch time

. . . and more!

10 times faster launch of VoIP calls

. . . and more!

roughly 50% less memory usage

. . . and more!

. . . and if you order right now . . . we will include the Spiral Slicer . . . at no extra cost!

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[pr0fessor]

Slack's underlying technology, like modern JavaScript tools

Re:

[leonbev]

A more interesting story would be how Slack plans to defend itself from Microsoft Teams, which is rapidly stealing their paid subscribers by bundling their product with their Office 365 subscription. Last I heard, Teams now has more paying customers than Slack does.

Re:

[Shark]

Are you kidding? This is the first case of a piece of software developed in the last 10 years that actually shows any semblance of concern for resource usage. It *is* news!

I want to know more... Did they hire a non-millenial and as a joke decide to humour his concerns about the code quality?

Thank IRIX and Solaris/FreeBSD Linuxites

[Seven Spirals]

XFS came from IRIX (and yes, it does rock) and ZFS came from Solaris with some pretty significant code contributions in the last few years from FreeBSD. Sure glad you Linux guys could kinda join the party. While working as a dev at a storage shop a few years ago we did resiliency testing of about 20 different file systems across many different Unix variants. Ext variants had good (sometimes even superior) performance in a *few* areas (mostly totally unsafe async writes). However, Ext2/3/4 did the absolute w

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And that is related to this "Slack" thing in what way exactly?

Re:

[Luke has no name]

it reads like a comment for the Dropbox article from today vs. the Slack discussion.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Surely Slackware is not the same thing as the "Slack's Desktop App" from the headline.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Not a bad strategy, but you'll be disappointed to know that in our testing Ext2 was the least reliable. It loses data when anyone farts around it. Reiser was a good choice, but as you say, once you go to federal prison for having your wife killed, it puts a damper on who will use your code.

Oh my god

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my god, who the hell cares?

100% less memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Not installing it uses 100% less memory

Why should I care

[sanf780]

I do not use Slack, but when has become startup time and RAM usage a big deal in the last few years? Does Slack crashes so many times that startup time is an issue? Does Slack use so much RAM that makes your machine use swap memory?

Re:

[djbckr]

... startup time is an issue? Does Slack use so much RAM that makes your machine use swap memory?

The answer is yes. To both questions.

Causes some compact laptops to thrash

[tepples]

Does Slack crashes so many times that startup time is an issue?

Even if it doesn't, a relaunch after a crash is not the only way to see startup time. Logging out of your operating system user session and logging back in also incurs startup time. This affects users who dual-boot Windows (to use or maintain a Windows application) and X11/Linux (to use or maintain an X11/Linux application).

Does Slack use so much RAM that makes your machine use swap memory?

I personally haven't used Slack's desktop app. But Skype's desktop app used well over 300 MB of RAM last time I tried it, as did Discord's. Given that Slack has been built on the same fr

Re:

[zidium]

Slack uses about 1 GB of RAM. That's why I always open it in a chrome tab where it only uses about 250 MB.

Re:

[tepples]

Is there a good way to write once and publish on all four of Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, and your website without "writing desktop apps in javascript with a bundled single-use browser"?

Re:

[tepples]

Neither C nor C++ includes a GUI framework. This means a program must use that of the platform (whether directly or indirectly), and all five major desktop and mobile platforms have different, mutually incompatible GUI frameworks. If you were in charge of writing the client software, how would you recover the cost of developing and maintaining a client that calls each of Win32, Cocoa, X11, Cocoa Touch, and whatever Android calls its GUI framework? If Qt, have you used Qt before?

Re:

[Frederic54]

Yes, Slack looks like an ircII client from the 80s, with emoji and some enhancement, but even on a quad core i7-8565 with 16GB of RAM and a SSD, it takes way too much time to load, and can take up to 1GB of RAM, mind you, for a window that displays some text. It also crash sometimes.

Re:Why should I care

[scdeimos]

If Slack used a total 1GB of RAM it wouldn't be quite so annoying. We had Slack foisted upon us a couple of years ago and commanded to join four teams (one for each office in each country we operate plus a university team). When you're used to having Visual Studio, SSMS and BIDS (now SSDT) open all day long to do your job it makes you very unhappy to see Low Memory dialogs pop because of Slack consuming 1.5GB... PER TEAM.

Wow. So I now only need 16GB to run two channels?

[shess]

It's hard to comprehend how we managed to run multiple chat streams at once on 8MB computers. What sorcery was that!?!

Things IRC didn't do 2 decades ago

[tepples]

These features have become expected among proprietary web chat platforms, such as Skype, Slack, and Discord, and I would be rawther surprised if the IRC infrastructure from two decades ago supported any of them.

A. Voice and video chat.
B. Automatic previews of linked HTML documents, including a title and picture, done server-side so that dozens of people in the same channel don't all hit the website at once.
C. Support for mixing all major writing systems, including contextual right-to-left systems (such as A

Re: Things IRC didn't do 2 decades ago

[bytestorm]

Are you not familiar with xmpp/jabber? It does all of that.

Re:

[tepples]

My point is that these features are why people aren't still using the more RAM-efficient software from two decades ago. Many users find these features compelling enough that once Slack became available, they switched from IRC to Slack in order to use them.

bloatware

[cjonslashdot]

Wow - a chat app, taking up hundreds of Mb. What a waste of resources. I guess "modern JavaScript tools and techniques" is supposed to be great stuff!!

Note: Those are median values

[93 Escort Wagon]

Performance may vary somewhat from computer to computer.

On my computer, for instance, the Slack desktop app uses 100% less memory.

"Modern Technologies"

[random-2001]

What kinds of "technologies" are programmers using now? What even is a "technology" for programmers??? Back when I was taught, all we had were libraries and compilers. It seems like there has been a large migration away from statically typed languages (C++/Java/Go) for desktop applications into the weird wonderland of *primarily* scripting languages (javascript/python). I guess there are more libraries??? Or maybe it's so you don't have to rewrite the program between the desktop/cellphone and browser-based

An no more 100% CPU?

[iTrawl]

For some reason my Slack goes into "I'll use 100% CPU for no reason and you have to quit me to work again" mode randomly after bringing my (Linux) laptop out of standby. Once it did it just because I disconnected the network, so I think it's a network-related bug. Somebody busy-loops on EOF or Broken Pipe in there.

Actual writeup from Slack itself

[whh3]

For those of you interested in a little more technical detail about their rewrite, here's a link to their engineering report about the upgrade:

https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop-308d6fe94ae4 [slack.engineering].

Re:

[kriston]

Wow, the article starts with a 19-year-old quote from Joel Spolsky about a few software redesigns that "failed."

Who quotes this?

Let's take a casual glance

[kriston]

Let's take a casual glance.

Still runs under %APPDATA% on Windows instead of %PROGRAMFILES%. The former is where ransomware runs from and can be blocked by security policy.

Now bundled using webpak [wikipedia.org] according to Slack and the manifest messages in the log file.

Code name is "The Final Countdown" and commit is 06572bf.

Getting better all the time.

So god damn boring

[Drunkulus]

I can't believe what passes for "technology" these days. It does warm my heart when dumbass venture backed startups like meal kit delivery services go under, and badly coded, unpatentable apps like snapchat get copied over a long weekend. Hey, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins! Can I get 100 million to launch my replacement for email? Look, it supports animated gifs!