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Slack's Desktop App Now Launches 33% Faster, Uses 50% Less Memory (venturebeat.com) 81

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it-is-worth dept.
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.
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Slack's Desktop App Now Launches 33% Faster, Uses 50% Less Memory More

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

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  • Thanks! (Score:1)

    by 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!

  • 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.

  • Slashvertisement (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:50PM (#58966480) Journal

    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.

    • 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

    • 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!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Slack's underlying technology, like modern JavaScript tools

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      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: (Score:2)

      by Shark ( 78448 )

      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?

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

  • Oh my god (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oh my god, who the hell cares?

  • 100% less memory (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Not installing it uses 100% less memory

  • 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: (Score:2)

      by djbckr ( 673156 )

      ... 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.

    • 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: (Score:2)

        by zidium ( 2550286 )

        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.

    • 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 (Score:4, Informative)

        by scdeimos ( 632778 ) on Monday July 22, 2019 @05:56PM (#58968790)
        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? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shess ( 31691 ) on Monday July 22, 2019 @01:54PM (#58966950) Homepage

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

    • 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

  • bloatware (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cjonslashdot ( 904508 ) on Monday July 22, 2019 @02:21PM (#58967166)
    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!!

  • Performance may vary somewhat from computer to computer.

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

  • 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

  • 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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by whh3 ( 450031 ) on Monday July 22, 2019 @05:18PM (#58968516) Homepage

    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: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      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.

    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.

  • 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!

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