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Comment by jacquesc | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently using these Electron Apps every day: Slack, Nylas, VSCode, Insomonia, Freeter, Mongobooster

On a 2015 macbook pro with 16GB of RAM.

The buggiest and most resource intensive apps I use tend to be the native ones (iTunes, Dropbox, BusyCal, Evernote).

iTunes is a mess. It's an ancient code base (dates back to SoundJam MP in the late 90s) and is a bizarre amalgamation of cross-platform pseudo-Cocoa, Cocoa, and webviews. It's a great example of how to not do a native app.

Also, I haven't used Evernote in years but last I checked, their app isn't true native but instead some kind of web wrapper trying to look native.

Slack on the desktop is a hunk of garbage. Sign in to even 3 slacks and it will eat almost a gig of ram and 5% CPU to... display v2014 irc chat. They really should be ashamed of themselves. I have to remember to kill it whenever I'm on battery.

I have 4 slack chats open and it's using about 550 MB of RAM and 0% CPU in total.

When I launch Slack in a cgroup with 512 MB of RAM it crashed, OOM, before loading. 1 team. It takes about 1024 to make it stable and prevent swap thrashing.

Five hundred and fifty megabytes of memory.

To display a chat. Or four.

I've been quite happy with Rambox, an app that aims to unify all your messaging services into one desktop app. Ironically, it's also built with Electron, but right now, it's sitting at 30MB RAM and 0,1% CPU with 3 Slacks, WhatsApp, (FB) Messenger and Discord loaded.

http://rambox.pro/

I can hardly imagine this working well, but I'm driven to install it and give it a try. Thanks for the link; maybe it will be magical!

Have you ever used Franz? If so, is Rambox better, in your opinion? Franz doesn't seem to be much better in RAM than a browser, but I can't imagine what Rambox does to improve that.

I haven't used Franz, because it's not open-source. I actually found Rambox after hearing about Franz and searching for an open-source alternative.

Both Rambox and (as I understand it) Franz just load the web interfaces of the services you configure, so performance wouldn't be better than Chromium, since that's what Electron uses. The added value is in the wrapper, which helps to keep everything organized, lets you open and close all services at once (by opening/closing Rambox), and provides a global 'do not disturb' mode for notifications.

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