I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.
RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.
Just reloaded the Slack tab in Firefox to clear down 1GB of RAM use.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.