undefined | Better HN

0 pointspachico5y ago0 comments

I understand your point, however I still think it's unacceptable to have 1-1.5 GB of RAM consumed by simply two Electron applications running idle.

0 comments

6 comments · 2 top-level

fabiospampinato5y ago· 4 in thread

That's not the baseline though, the baseline RAM consumption for an Electron app is about 100MB. If you have garbage code as input it doesn't matter which stack executes it, you'll have garbage performance output.

alcover5y ago

Even 100MB is crazy. I know RAM is cheap but the absurdity of that amount is beyond me.

fabiospampinato5y ago

It's a lot for sure, but it's not quite that simple:

- First of all the amount of RAM consumed actually depends on how much free RAM you have, Electron thinking it's a browser boggles up some extra RAM "just in case", which is a tread-off that probably works better for actual browsers than the average Electron app.

- Secondly while displaying "hello world" costs you ~100MB of RAM the RAM required as the app scales in complexity doesn't scale quite that fast, you may very well work on your app for a year and still need about ~100MB or RAM for it, you'll have to write very inefficient code (or keep a lot of data in memory) for it to require 1GB for JS' heap or something crazy like that.

Still ~100MB is a lot for sure, I think a lot of it could be trimmed away if the developers really tried to lower memory usage significantly, like maybe a much more efficient "Electron Mini" could be made with some effort.

CivBase5y ago

How many Electron applications do you honestly have running on your computer at any given time such that 100MB each is so concerning?

Right now I'm running VS Code and PyCharm, each with an one open project and one open editor. PyCharm is eating 1.8 GB while VS Code is only eating 130 MB. Funny enough, I see people complain about VS Code being a resource-hungry Electron app all the time but I've never seen anyone gripe about the resource usage of JetBrainz IDEs.

This isn't an excuse to Electron all the things, but browser-based GUIs do have their place.

Klonoar5y ago

It’s not crazy - go run a blank Cocoa app in Xcode and see how much memory it takes.

People have unrealistic expectations on this.

simias5y ago

Honestly I could try to ignore the memory consumption if at least it was snappy. The few electron apps I use have visible lag when I do something that forces a large redraw.

That's a problem that didn't have with GTK app running on a computer with one order of magnitude less computing power and RAM two decades ago. VS code on the first computer I used to program would probably be unusable (if it even launched), yet we had full fledged IDEs back then. I'm not talking about advanced language server plugins here, just basic usage.

The great side effect of this is that if you avoid all this wasteful crap and keep using old school technology, computers are snappier than ever. My terminal always pops up instantly, nvim fires up faster than I can press return, rg lets me search a huge codebase with barely noticeable latency. My IMAP mail client is faster, more configurable and more ergonomic than any webmail I've seen.

Life is good when you avoid the www.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse