Signal-desktop: App is unusable with how slow it is

[Hnasar]

I'm trying to send a single message to my friend and I don't have my phone on me, I open the signal app on my laptop and I've been waiting here for over 15 minutes waiting for the messages to finish updating. Signal is using 100% of one of my CPU cores and I'm on message 1030 out of who the hell knows. My battery has dropped 20% so far.

It didn't used to be like this, can we revert whatever intoduce this regression? It used to allow me to browse and send messages while it updated. That was tolerable. This is stupidly unusable.

Also for me and my friend the signal app has forgotten each of our contact names seemingly out of the blue after a recent update.

I've not noticed anything but regressions in any of the recent app updates. This is not good.

app verision: 0.43.2. Fedora 26. i5-5300U CPU @ 2.30GHz
Debug log: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ea98f6532f5b90006ae34c98f72e1423

[Transisto]

I don't think I'll ever come back here again, Not being able to access my contact from Signal Chrome for almost a week made me switch all my teams to Wire.

[riyapenn]

@Hnasar Your log indicates you are on Signal 0.43.2. Can you update to Signal 0.43.3 and see if you still have these issues?

For manual updates:

1. Go to or enter in the address bar chrome://extensions/
2. Check on 'Developer-Mode'
3. Scroll through your list to Signal and Check on 'Enabled'
4. Scroll back to the top of the page and click the 'Update Extensions Now' button at the top right of the page

[allefeld]

Not sure whether this is the same problem, but just in case: I also had the problem that synchronization on start of Signal Desktop takes ages. I resolved the problem by activating the option "Delete old messages" (under "Chats and Media / Message trimming" in the Android app, and setting the "Conversation length limit" to 200. At first, the messages weren't trimmed in the Desktop app, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the extension.

[scottnonnenberg]

@Hnasar I'm really sorry you're running into such difficulty using the app. If you'd like to see the list of recent changes made to the app, I invite you to take a look at our release notes: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/releases

One thing to know is that we value your privacy and don't collect any kind of usage analytics, so your feedback like this is extremely important. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you use Signal Desktop? Do you sleep your computer between uses? How long do you typically let it sleep? Your usage of the mobile apps while Signal Desktop is not running will affect our startup time. About how many messages do you send and receive per day?

Finally, how to make things better? 1000 messages is the maximum the server will keep around for you between launches of the desktop app. If you launch it more often, it won't have as much catch-up to do.

[deutrino]

Related to #1442?

[deutrino]

Isn't there a lot of overlap between this issue, #1442, and a fair amount with #1495?

Edit: #1442 is explicitly about Electron and this one is talking about Chrome, but it seems that the underlying issue is the same, and @scottnonnenberg did mention protocol limitations. I'm mainly wondering if it would be best to consolidate issues in light of that.

[scottnonnenberg]

I'm gonna close this in favor of #1442