Wtf are you doing with it? My slack instance (on linux) is resting around 300 MB resident set size and 0% cpu. 300 MB is still a lot for a chat app, but it is definitely not gigabytes.
If you just add up memory usage for subprocesses you are likely to over count due to shared memory. The number you typically want to add up in Linux is ‘proportional set size’ which is, I think, the sum over every page of the process’s memory of page_size / number of processes which can access the page. I don’t know what happens if you mmap some physical memory twice (I think some newish Java GC does this).
I did not know that. Maybe it would have been better to spend more time trying to find the original comic (I guess maybe an image search. Doomscrolling @bruised_blood is a lost cause).
Why yes, Slack does seem to be written poorly - just as poorly as every other web app that I use including VS Code, Discord, MS Teams, etc..
Maybe the Slack developers are just stupid, uneducated, malicious, poorly managed, or ambivalent (or all of the above) but the platform does to be conducive to creating clunky and bloated software.
While i agree with your overall point, i think that VS Code is one of the better (only?) examples of really good web technology based software. It's snappy, reliable and has very few bugs.