The only times I see a hit on perf is when I run react-native server, genymotion emulator, chrome, and android studio along with atom. But then, I see a perf hit on everything at these times.
My computer is not powerful at all so Atom is obviously slow as hell and lags all the time, at first I thought I improved my typing skills because I was typing faster than the editor was displaying the characters, but that was obviously not the case. Most Atom users — or at least the most active users — use rMBPs with i7 CPUs and (maybe?) 16GB of RAM, I don't want to buy a computer like that just to use a code editor like this, I would do it for an IDE though; and even if I had a computer like this I would not want to give most of its resources to the code editor when there are more important things to spend the CPU / RAM on.
If your intention is to open a database dump then use a different tool, a proper log viewer or something like that, I don't even understand why would you want to use a code editor — even with good performance — to inspect a DB dump in the first place.
Database dump and log files are just good example of potentially big text files. They should be usable in any text editor. Not looking at the issue is not a good way to build software.
Atom is for writing code, not viewing logs. We have tail and syslog and a thousand other tools for that.
"Atom - A hackable text editor"
Atom runs fast enough on my MBP, but I could never get the packages and plug-ins to consistently play nicely with the corporate proxies and firewalls at my current employer. So, I gave it up in favor of Visual Studio Code. The updates and plug-in installations for Code simply Just Work.
atom runs slow for me. just too frustrating to use even though i would like to use it (even despite reporting bugs that essentially get left to die). sublime just runs faster.