As you're probably aware we experienced some unplanned downtime today. It has been claimed it was entirely the fault of Russian Hackers. They invaded fluorine and caused the database updating code in rehash to not update the database this last site update. Which is just as well, I suppose, since two of the SQL statements refuse to complete even when run manually. That I'm going to have to chalk up to a misconfigured ndbd on helium and neon.
tl;dr The long and short of it is, we'll be fine until we can get those updates into the database, but it is going to mean more downtime this weekend.
~TMB
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday February 08 2018, @03:26PM
Both the desktop client for Slack and the desktop client for Discord are Electron apps. Electron is like installing a separate copy of Google Chrome that's hardcoded to view one website. It takes just as much RAM as any other Chromium browser, as opposed to the slightly smaller footprint of viewing multiple sites in one web browser or the much smaller footprint of something like Pidgin or HexChat.
Buy more RAM? Not at these DRAM prices, which have been gradually rising over the past few years, and not with compact laptop motherboards continuing to limit installed RAM to single digit GB.