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Comment by juandazapata | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I'll seat here, wishing for an update that won't make the editor eat almost 2GB of RAM after opening 3 text files :(

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I remember seeing a similar complaint in the 1.4 release thread complaining about memory usage, and when I compared my own Atom memory usage with a project with about a half-dozen files open and it wasn't anyhere close to that.

Wonder what's going on.

Same here, I use Atom for all my projects. Sometimes with > 10 files open at once. I've never seen it get anywhere that bad.

In that thread the issue turned out to be a .git-folder in $HOME

Who would have thought that using an HTML DOM and rendering for low level tasks would consume resources!?

The web works fantastic in a browser but it seems like as soon as you try and port it to a native mobile application or desktop application; you can tell there is a performance difference from native code.

We only put up with shitty performance on the web because we're used to it.

We expect proper performance for actual programs.

There's actually two problems:

javascript vs. machine code generated from c (or a c-like)

rebuilding UI elements in HTML and rendering them with a browser engine vs. native UI toolkit.

Often in comparisons the emphasis is only on the first one, and the difference usually isn't that big (maybe a factor of 2). The real issue actually is the second problem, it's much worse.

That's also why I find the trend to do user interfaces in HTML so terrible: native UI toolkits work better and use less resources. The only advantage is that they run everywhere, but so does drawing into a 2D pixel matrix and rendering it.

Is "run everywhere" really still a problem? Qt e.g. works on everything from Windows to bare metal embedded Linux framebuffers to iOS devices.

I switched back to sublime when I found that atom was corrupting my files, by inserting different characters than the ones I was typing. I've seen this issue pop up several times, and when it does I stop using atom for several months.

This time around I discovered that sublime really is a lot faster than atom, and has better go support. Who cares if it never gets updated. :-)

I also regularly hit that bug where it starts inserting what I type "in parallel" in different places in the file. It's... upsetting.

FYI multiple cursors is a big feature of Sublime and Atom. Are you perhaps triggering that without realizing it?

Oh, it could be. I'll keep an eye next time. Tbanks!

It's almost definitely what it is. You're probably still holding down CMD or CTRL, even if briefly, when you start clicking.

Indeed. But it's not just about the memory usage. I have been using Atom to edit AsciiDoc documents and after having written more than 1000 lines or so, there is a noticeable delay after typing each keystroke. That may have been due to the AsciiDoc preview plugin I was using, but IIRC I disabled that and the issue persisted.

Your case may have been incidental to a prior version, but while I've observed lag relative to Sublime Text, Atom (on Linux) uses a little over 100 MB RAM and all my cores are at low utilization.

I don't know why they don't take the resource intensive stuff and push it into a "web server" that Atom then hits as a client, it is after all a "web client"?

I run it on a Macbook Pro. Admittedly I have 16 GB of RAM but it runs great!

I have the same machine. It's markedly slower than Sublime (though I used it full time until recently, as I really want it to do well. I've recently switched to various JetBrains tools)

Gosh, I couldn't complain about Atom being slow and then move to JetBrains stuff personally... While they are a lot better than they used to be, and they're amazingly powerful and fully featured, "fast" isn't a word id use to describe them unfortunately

I really never complained, just accepted it as a cost. JetBrains is definitely slower, but I get a ton of functionality, whereas Atom was just Sublime only slightly slower and open source.

It doesn't run slow at all and it's free so it has that advantage over Sublime

If you don't already have a Sublime license, then I do think it's the best option. (I do have a Sublime license however)

Slowness is of course relative, and yes, it's slower than Sublime. For instance, when searching using regex. Or opening large files.

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