New Slack update claims to be faster and use 50% less RAM

I love Slack. I use for work and find it a very effective way to communicate effectively within a large organisation with different teams. Unfortunately, like any feature-rich applications, it’s packed with features, but is an absolute resource hog to deliver those features.

And while most people using it on their mobile devices might not notice that, when you’re using the Slack app on a desktop and then combine it with other desktop applications and Google’s Chrome browser, then you really start to notice the incredible memory constraint it places on your machine. Thankfully, this is something which the company is starting to address as Slack has unveiled a new desktop app (available for download now) for Windows and macOS which claims to be 33 per cent faster than before while gobbling up 50 per cent less RAM.

That is a remarkable performance improvement if those claims are true. To enable this massive efficiency, jump Slack has totally rebuilt their desktop app to better cater to multiple workspaces. The result is that Slack will no longer create a standalone copy for each workspace and take up RAM for each instance. Instead, it reuses components and uses a more modern codebase. Slack has also been modernising their codebase and while their desktop apps still run on Electron, all the UI parts have been rebuilt using React to fix some of the shortcomings of the existing Slack app.

It’s not just about performance enhancement though, as the company also wants their app to behave better when a person goes offline. Rather than now simply not letting you go into the app when a person is not connected to the internet, the app will cache your session data better and allow you to still look back on messages in some of your regular channels.

Sack continues to be a great app for workplace communication and hopefully, with these improvements, it will only make it even more of a joy to use without slowing the rest of your machine down.

Last Updated: July 23, 2019