Comment by BuildTheRobots | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BuildTheRobots | Hacker News Reader

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My biggest objection to Atom over Sublime is the memory overhead when opening even moderately large files.

I'm in ops rather than dev, so often deal with 10mb+ log files - but don't have a lot of the IDE type requirements of my colleagues. Sublime open them in seconds and is nice and quick to search through and look at. Trying to open a 10mb file in atom causes it to chew up 1.2gb of ram and it's laggy when scrolling nevermind when trying to search etc.

Sublime on the other hand not only starts up quicker and is more responsive, but it's only costing me 100mb of ram for my 10mb file as well as 20 others I've not bothered closing.

If I try and load a 100mb file in sublime it doesn't balk. Takes about 8 seconds to load, but once loaded it's amazingly responsive (to the point where I thought I still had my 10mb not 100mb file loaded). Atom attempts to open the file but takes forever and then dies after exhausting the 8gb ram on my laptop.

tldr: sublime feels stable, lean and fast vs memory munching and perceivably slow.

Edit: oh, and atom's installer is 104mb, the new build of sublime3 is 8mb.

edit2: Even after a clean boot atom just crashes trying to open a large file well before it fills up my memory, so no idea.

My only interaction with Atom so far was trying to paste a 8k chars line in a dojo on someone's recent mac pro. It crashed every single time and crashed again on opening as it was trying to load the file with the long line on startup. In the end I had to use vim to open it, was instant and I could actually remove that line (not a vim user).

Exact reason why I too stick to ST3.

This was a concern of mine before switching from Sublime to Atom on the Atom 1.0 release, but I don't open moderately large files often so I really don't worry about it anymore.

Atom has come a long way and I love using it.

There have been times where files have been too big even for Sublime Text to load on my Macbook without slowing it down. In those cases I've used Vim with the LargeFile plugin.

Is this the right Vim plugin? [1] - if so wasn't aware; will add it to the toolkit with thanks :)

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1506

> Trying to open a 10mb file in atom causes it to chew up 1.2gb of ram

Truly?! That's a factor of 100x, that's ridiculous.

TBH, I'd kind of expect an editor to use a factor maybe 2x of the loaded file (for quick access indices, searching, etc). More if you count undo-buffers, of course.

I could well be reading the stats wrong, but yes; really - this is tested on Windows 7 64bit (latest updates). Opening Atom without any plugins, themes or files loaded seems to require approx 150mb just to be alive.

Do you edit the large files, or only look at them?

Depends what I'm doing. Sometimes I need to edit as well as just view them. I have seen the Atom text-tail plugin that keeps getting mentioned but when I went to install it the homepage says Atom now copes with large files so it's been depreciated... I have to be honest, at this point I lost interest and went back to sublime.

Call me old fashioned, but the #1 feature I want from my text editor is the ability to edit plain text files... everything else is gravy (though syntax highlighting and regex's are two "features" I really like).

Amusingly (and only tangentially related), I just realised that notepad.exe on windows 7, which I always remember balking at files in the single MB range copes with my 100mb test file amicably and only chews 225mb of ram (21mb for my 10mb test file).

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