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    I’ve seen a few posts about Slack’s backend engineering. I’m normally interested in stuff like this, but honestly, their frontend client is so slow - so frustratingly slow - that I never read them. I wish they’d get it sorted out, I mean it’s truly abysmal.

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      This is an excellent post, great engineering work. I’m bookmarking it to send to people who do sloppy roll-outs. I highly recommend you read it even if you don’t like the client.

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        I’ve never really experienced it being that slow. When do you find it slow?

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          All the time. This is on fairly crappy hardware, mind, but still, compared to almost all other applications on my system it’s incredibly sluggish.

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            I use their desktop app on a pretty fast MBP. Switching between teams is painful, and I have a lot of issues with views being displayed and then updated a few seconds later, which is disorienting.

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              I tap a push notification from slack on mobile, and it takes >30 seconds to show me the message (on an iPhone 6s, one of the most used devices).

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                Slack tends to run slow in larger teams. Normally, I’d chalk it up to slower hardware, but I recently started using it on a newer Dell work laptop, and it is very easy for it to get slowed down if you’re doing anything with the rest of the machine.

                I think the slack desktop front-end really could use a round of performance improvements so that it runs well on hardware that wasn’t literally released this year, or otherwise highly priced.

                @nhooyr: What is the relative size of the teams you’ve been using it on? How many gifs do they use, how many channels are you usually in?