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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Have a 100% solid reason why:

There's already too many of them, and some hardware doesn't like having too many chrome instances running at once.

My PC is an i7 with 4 hyper-threaded cores, and an Nvidia Quadro 2000M. I usually have running, as far as electron goes: Chrome, Discord, remote-working app.

As soon as i add another electron app to the mix the hardware interrupt activity of my machine goes out of control, presumably because too many chrome instances are trying to share the same device for hardware acceleration.

This never happens with non-electron software.

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We'll investigate if that causes issues with Postman. I haven't faced that problem and I don't think there is a hard limitation on the platform where it can't be optimized. Hardware acceleration is not something that happens continuously - only when things are rendering. More true for games than desktop software perhaps.

I know it's a rare case, and i haven't been able to reproduce it 100% reliable, but in most cases when 4+ chromes want to do stuff, my hardware goes "nope, fuck that" and degrades performance for everything while spooling the CPU up noticably. The same hardware handles a single chrome just fine even when doing full-on 3d stuff. Sometimes just scrolling through twitter with 3 electron apps running starts the stutters.

So for me electron apps are simply only viable if i absolutely need them, and i curse the name of anyone who thinks they're a good idea for anything but rapid prototyping every single day.

Mind, i'm aware you have what you have right now, and going another path would be quite the expenditure. However i think it's not much to ask to refrain from calling it native, when it's actually electron, and thus helping people impacted by this kind of performance issue figure out that your app is one of the contributing ones.

Hmm. If you are on Postman, I'd love to get your help in debugging this. Performance issues that I have seen exist at massive scale for us - ~10K requests or hundreds of collections. Of course, working on optimizing for all of these cases.

Not sure you can do anything there, unless you intend to change the chromium source. The problems here are on the hardware level, which you're, owing to sitting on top of chromium, far removed from.

That said, i don't use Postman, heard of it the first time today. But you might be able to reproduce some of the issues by loading a very animation-heavy imgur page like https://imgur.com/a/0L8Bu , scrolling to the gifs, maybe zooming out a little to get more on screen, and starting up a bunch of different electron apps. Particularly helpful would be using https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexpl... to keep an eye on the interrupt CPU usage. Once you start seeing lots of red activity you're getting close.

We don't need to change the chromium source. Everything is not sitting on top of Chromium. I haven't tried this just yet but node-pre-gyp allows packaging C++ too. https://github.com/mapbox/node-pre-gyp

Well hey, if that allows you to cut down on a lot of whatever chrome's doing, yay. :)

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