I spend most of my time on a computer with a 4790K and 32 GB of ram. There, admittedly, I don’t have any performance issues—but that’s because I have a ridiculous amount of overhead for something like Slack!
I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time.
These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!
I understand where you’re coming from, but I also think that having a generally-reasonable-ish response time on decade old hardware that was considered lightweight-tier even at the time is not as awful as you make it seem.
I'm on a 2017 MacBook Pro right now with a 300Mb connection, and using the web interface takes multiple seconds to change channels, has a > 1 second delay in typing (resulting in missing keystrokes). My workstation isn't a particularly pleasant experience and it's _much_ beefier than this machine. My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better.
I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
> My partner uses MS teams on a beater of a windows laptop with at most 4GB of ram and it performs substantially better.
So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
I don't disagree, but starting in electron is going to make your life much more difficult. Well engineered electron-based code may still be slower than shoddy C++
As an example, I've been playing with web frameworks recently. Asp.net running on dotnet core is roughly 10 times faster than node running express. While well engineered js might not get much slower, you'll never close that gap.
I'd expect to have the same experience on most $300 Windows laptops, though. And even on better computers, what is that doing to electricity usage and multi-tasking performance?
FWIW I've had significantly better performance using the web interface, pretty much at all times. And as a bonus, you can open the same slack instances in multiple tabs and copy/paste/crosslink with relative ease.
It's still a hog of course, but it's broadly better.
I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time.
These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!