Ask HN: Anyone else being bothered by keyboard lag in Slack?

2 points·sgt··4 comments

I am experiencing a keyboard lag in Slack (presumably this applies to other Electron apps as well?) and it is driving my crazy.

I haven't measured it, but it feels like 1-2 ms per keystroke.

Anyone else experiencing this? I am using a USB keyboard on a Mac as the Bluetooth keyboard was also giving a minor lag (but likely less than 1 ms).

Right now it is driving me bonkers.

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On 60fps every frame is displayed for about 16ms. So lags can only appear in multiples of 16ms. How do you come up with 1-2 ms delay per keystroke?

To answer your question though: I find Slack's typing responsiveness acceptable.

EDIT: To narrow down the source of your problem you might try to use Slack in the app if you are using it in the browser or vice versa.

I don't believe that is true. Although one cannot visually perceive a lag of 1ms but while typing I think one can.

No human can perceive lag in the range of 1-2ms. In fact you'll need to put in a lot of effort to reduce input delay between keyboard and screen to 30-40ms under ideal conditions, the average computer is much slower than that [0].

My usual issues with Electron apps are about performance in general, not (just) input. There's a good chance the browser version runs better, and afaik it should also have a smaller resource overhead.

[0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

I just wrote a little key catcher written in C using the select(2) syscall with stdin, and set it to 1ms delay per keystroke.

I guess you could be right; right now I couldn't say exactly for sure whether 1ms is noticeable.

However, when setting it to 10ms it is very noticeable if you type fast.

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