Getting to Slack Faster with Incremental Boot
Article Summary
Mark Christian from Slack reveals how they saved users 49.5 days of waiting time every single day. The secret? Rethinking when to show content during app boot.
Slack's web app traditionally loaded everything before showing any content, forcing users to stare at loading screens while building a complete team model. As teams grew larger, this approach became increasingly painful. The engineering team decided to adopt mobile's smarter strategy: show something useful immediately, then fill in the rest.
Key Takeaways
- Content visible time dropped from 7 seconds to under 5 seconds
- Parallel API calls during boot improved fully loaded time to 6 seconds
- Two phase loading: render initial channel first, complete model second
- 4.2 million daily loads means 1 second saved equals 49.5 days recovered
By splitting boot into incremental phases and parallelizing API calls, Slack reduced time to content by 2+ seconds while also improving overall load time.
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This page summarizes “Getting to Slack Faster with Incremental Boot” by Slack, published Jul 5, 2016. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
